


Anyone Else Would Be (A Desiccated Corpse) By Now

by ArwenLune



Series: Rock Happy 'verse [19]
Category: Generation Kill, Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1, The Losers (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Crossover, Friendship, Gen, POV Outsider, Roque didn't leave, Team, The Further Adventures Of Brad Colbert IN SPACE, The Losers AU, The SGCs A+ Approach To Recruiting, Unlikely Connections In The Name Of Crossover YAY, Whole lotta fuckin' swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-10-16
Packaged: 2018-01-08 06:57:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 29,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1129673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArwenLune/pseuds/ArwenLune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lee recognises somebody in a bar and takes a not entirely well thought out trip down memory lane. Brad goes along for the ride.</p><p>The Losers.. well, they were about ready for a new adventure, anyway.</p><p>"Jensen, man, I owe you a beer. This is the first time ever that your crazy ideas weren't crazy <i>enough</i>."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I first saw The Losers last year when I was at sea and I was far too busy for it to really sink in. Then I read & listened to the stunning [ Team Dynamics, Family, and Other Things That Will Hurt You](http://archiveofourown.org/series/14993) series and it really sunk in that I wanted to spend some more time with those people. And also that I really unexpectedly came to like Roque and wanted a version where he stays with the team, damn it. 
> 
> So naturally, they came to the Rock Happy universe. Because that's where I collect people I like spending time with in my head :-)  
> So people who are new to Rock Happy: this is my (giant!) verse where Marines from Generation Kill ended up stationed in Atlantis. You don't need to know GK (except that it's about Marines) and you don't really need to know Stargate Atlantis (except that it's about people travelling to another galaxy and there's space vampires) though this story will probably make a hell of a lot more sense if you've either read Rock Happy or seen an episode of Stargate

Atlantis Recon 4 - well, the core three members - were in a bar in DC. They were in civvies relaxing over Belgian beer - Lee's beer snobbery getting humoured - after a long day of IOA bullshit. It was their last evening in DC. After this, Captain Darren Avery would be heading back to Atlantis, Captain Lee Brittner would stick around Cheyenne Mountain for a few days of synching up with her SGC Combat Rescue counterpart, and Staff Sergeant Brad Colbert was headed to Florida to get certified for Rescue Diver. He'd done all the training on Atlantis, but since they couldn't exactly put a highly classified base under 'issued by,' he had to go and do the final examination on Earth.

The bar was more crowded than he'd have liked, because Brad had a hard time losing his mission reflexes of wanting to keep oversight of the space, but the mood was relaxed enough that he wasn't worried.

Until Lee, who had been at the bar to pick their next fancy beer from the selection, apparently saw somebody on the other side of the horse-shoe shaped bar, and went over. Brad sat a little more upright in their corner booth, tracking her through the crowd. She was talking to a tall black man who immediately set off Brad's warning bells. He wasn't officially her Personal Security Detail here, but after more than a year and a hundred different alien bars at her six, looking out for her was an instinct he couldn't just switch off.

He really missed the radio sets right now, because then he could ping her to check in, the way they did on missions.

Darren was on the phone, and though he saw the same thing Brad saw, he gave a 'wait and see' waggle of his hand, not seeming concerned. Brad grimaced and signalled that he was going to check it out anyway, and Darren nodded in acknowledgement.

From closer up Brad confirmed his first assessment. The guy - clad in jeans and a dark blue Henley with the sleeves pushed up - had military bearing and at least two concealed weapons that Brad could see. Which meant there were probably at least two more.

OK, in all fairness, Brad was carrying two blades, so was Darren, and he knew Lee had a taser and a small ceramic knife stashed away somewhere.

Still, they were armed because there was still a chance that the Trust - shady bastards, though Brad didn't know all that much about them - would try to kidnap Atlantis Expedition members again when they were Earthside.

Something about the guy reminded Brad oddly of Ronon, a general air of danger, of violence just under the surface, let out when it suit the man himself, not others.

Brad doubted he was active military, unless he was the kind of operator so far into the black that nobody cared as long as you got the job done.

"--skin grafts, but it healed pretty well," Lee was telling the guy. She looked relaxed and pleased to be talking to him. It wasn't at all the posture he saw off-world when she wanted help, or just one of the team to join the conversation, and he turned to the bar, intending to just hang around nearby.  

"Hey Brad," she said, spotting him, and he knew she knew what he was doing there, that he was checking in on her, but she didn't mind. He was grateful she was willing to humour his over-vigilance even when it restricted her movement or privacy sometimes.

The other man whipped around, and the way he moved definitely confirmed Brad's assessment. He deliberately relaxed his posture. Brad wasn't a threat to this guy, but he wasn't going to be intimidated either.  

"Who's this?" the guy asked Lee. "Boyfriend?"

Brad smiled slightly, but left it to her to frame their relationship. On some missions she did claim they were together - outside of a military context it was the easiest, least suspicious way to explain their closeness and his protectiveness of her. And sometimes she said yes because she was an evil, evil woman, and claimed that handling curveballs made him a better offworld operator. (She was maybe not wrong about that - he'd become much, much better at going with the flow and improvising.)

"Friend," she said with a smile. "Brad, this is Will Roque. He and his team were the ones to find me after the crash, in Afghanistan."

SpecOps, then. She'd never told him details, but he knew the general gist of what had happened. She'd been the flight nurse on a helo when it was shot down in the mountains, and despite a severe burn on her leg and hip, had been the least wounded afterward. She'd kept herself and some of the other survivors alive and safe for the five days until they were found, and it had taken two more days before they could be extracted.

"Nice to meet you," he said neutrally, offering his hand.

Roque accepted it, and the men sized eachother up. Brad wasn't really used to people who were larger than him, and while this guy wasn't taller, he was broader through the shoulders, definitely had weight on him. He was older, too - late thirties, early forties. He probably hadn't faced space vampires, but even disregarding the scar around his eye he looked like he'd lived through plenty of other shit.

Lee cleared her throat in an unsubtle warning to play nice, and Brad repressed a grin when the both of them turned back to her, neither of them repentant about the posturing.

He saw Roque give her an assessing look, and Brad wondered what he saw. Back when Roque first met her she had been a nurse, long before the SGC got hold of her. Long before SERE and Combat Rescue and Stargates and a hundred planets with a thousand ways to kill you. Long before Wraith. Even at her most civilian - a top that bared her collarbones and _dangly earrings_ , for fuck's sake - it was hard for Brad to see Lee as anybody but the woman who'd once snapped at Colonel Sheppard that 'Barging in and improvising is _not_ a valid approach to mission planning, sir.' and that he would damn well wait with the rescue op until she had intel and a strategy for him.

(He knew she'd had a private little freakout about that later, after the captives had been brought home safely. But in the moment it had been both justified and correct.)

Brad thought that maybe Roque saw it too, because the guy's lips quirked.

"Clay's here," he offered gruffly.

"And the rest of the boy band? They okay?"

"Yeah, they're fine."

Brad sent a surreptitious text to Darren. _L met guys rescue Afgh /2_

This wasn't a mission, but he added the 2-out-of-5 threat level assessment anyway, because its inclusion in itself would tell Darren that while he didn't see any danger right now, Brad considered it a potentially volatile situation. Darren would be on alert.

Roque lead them to a half-circle booth in the back, where a mid-forties guy in a suit was drinking whiskey and a younger blonde man in glasses poked at a smartphone and ate nachos without looking. Brad wasn't sure from behind her, but he thought he saw Lee startle to see the younger man.

"Look who I found," Roque announced, and they both looked up. Suit guy glanced at Lee with recognition, but his eyes slid straight to Brad and narrowed. Yeah, these guys were SpecOps - Suit Guy had 'officer' all over him. And there was no way in hell any of these guys would buy that Brad was either civilian or just a friend.

"Lily.." the blonde guy snapped his fingers and pointed at her with a grin. "Lily Brittner."

"Good to see you, Jensen, Clay," she nodded at them. "This is Brad."

"Glad to see you on your feet, Lily," Suit Guy said, making an inviting gesture. Lee sat down in the booth, moving over a little so Brad could sit at the open end of the bench. Roque sat down at the other open end, and slid the bowl of nachos away from Jensen and in front of Lee.

She ate one without apparent thought. Then she looked down at the bowl, then to Jensen, to Roque, and then back at the nachos. A grin bloomed on her face, and then Roque was grinning too, shaking his head as if he only just realised what he did. All of them laugh, and Brad wondered what the hell he just missed.

"When the helo was shot down, most of the emergency rations burned up," Lee finally explained to him, when they'd all quietened down. "And by the time these guys found me, I was not in the… most rational state of mind," she said, weighing her words with a quirk of her lips that said he knew enough about her to interpret that for himself.

And yes, he found that he did know enough; he'd been in a situation with her where they'd worried about going hungry. Not to mention back then she must have been walking around with a severe, and mostly untreated burn, and surrounded by dead and dying people.

"Also, hopped up on poppy tea," Jensen added brightly.

"That, too," she agreed. "My memories aren't too clear, but I'm pretty sure every time somebody came near me, there was an outstretched hand with food." She held up a nacho contemplatively, and ate it. "Like feeding a stray cat."

"A reflex clearly not all of us have managed to shed," Suit Guy - Clay - said with an amused glance at Roque.

"Roque feeds stray cats and dogs wherever we go, boss," Jensen said brightly.

Roque huffed, but didn't deny it, and from the glare Brad got when he took the last nacho from the bowl still in front of Lee, he wondered if maybe Roque had some food issues of his own.

"So!" Jensen said, and Brad might have been be glad of the subject change if he didn't hear every ill-advised time Ray Person opened his mouth, ever. "How did the SERE thing work out for you?"

That meant they've looked into her record at some point. It was a matter of public record that she went through SERE - too hard to hide, too many people who knew, apparently. It was spun as a test case for women going through that sort of training course, though of course it had since then gone conveniently quiet about the 'test results'.

He felt her shoe against the side of his. Two taps, then two again. _Get me a plausible exit._

He checked his watch, thinking he could claim they were going to see a movie. Before he could say so, she was speaking again.

"Didn't really change my life," she shrugged, because that was her official cover. That she was still a Flight Nurse, just stationed in Okinawa. As covers went Brad thought it sucked, because nobody with eyes who knew her before the SGC would believe she was still in the same job. These guys definitely didn't, and that was probably why she wanted an exit; this was rapidly turning into an OpSec situation. "Got bumped up to Captain though."

"Didn't really change your life, apart from the part where you started working with a Recon Marine?" Clay said with studied interest.

"Guys, it has been _really_ great to see you," Lee said, in a calm, firm tone that left no doubts about that change of position. "But this conversation is about to turn into one of those awkward mutual 'can't tell you about work' situations, and really, who wants to bother with that? So tedious," she said mildly. "Thank you very much for taking good care of me, back then. Pass my regards to the others. We've got to get back to our evening."

Brad took the cue, and they both got up.

Jensen looked like somebody kicked his puppy. Clay didn't look surprised, though not pleased either. Just nodded in acceptance and shook her hand.

"Stay safe," she said in parting.

Roque was suddenly on his feet, eerily quiet and fluid for such a big man. Brad tensed when he blocked their path.

"Hey," he said quietly to Lee. Cut a look over her shoulder to Brad. "He got your back?"

"Yeah, he does," she answered, and Brad couldn't see her face, but he could hear the hint of a smile in her voice. He felt a sudden liking for Roque, because the man was looking out for Lee, and that abruptly aligned their purposes.

"Good."

She patted Roque's arm in goodbye as she passed him. Brad gave the man a nod of acknowledgement, and maybe Roque did see that they are not at cross purposes here, because he gave one back.

Brad followed Lee through the crowd and back to their own table. Darren looked up when they appeared, saw her face, and grabbed his coat. Apparently they were leaving.

 

"Lee?" Darren asked when they're a couple of streets away.

"Fuckfuckfuck," she finally said, sounding like she'd been saying it in her head since the moment they left the three men at their table. "I fucked up, sir. Just wanted to say hi and thank you, but they got all interested in what I'm doing now. And Jensen was there - not a lot of digital things stay hidden from him."

"What did you tell them, exactly?"

"Nothing really?" she grimaced. "I just failed to conceal that I'm doing classified work, and they're bound to get very curious about that. I thought about warning Jensen he'd get black-vanned if he dug into it, but that would have just made him more determined. Fuck, I would never have made contact if I'd known he was there."

"Mm," Darren hummed noncommittally. He nodded his head toward the cinema signs.

They wordlessly split up as they neared the cinema, Darren dropping back a little. Lee linked arms with Brad and asked him which movie he wanted to see, and he bought them tickets for something action-packed. He was getting better at this, at the seamless switch into a cover, and they made first-date appropriate conversation while he got them popcorn.

Darren had gone into a different movie screening. They sat in the back, acting coupley, and once the movie was well underway, they used the cover of a loud action scene to exit via the emergency exit at the back.

 

About ten minutes later met up with Darren in their hotel suite. He was already doing the routine bug-sweep.

"Any tails?" he asked once he'd cleared the room.

"Don't think so," Brad answered.

"I don't think it was a setup," Lee said quietly, kicking off her shoes and dropping down onto the sofa. "Roque really was surprised. Weird coincidence, but coincidence."

"But you think they'll dig, and dig successfully?"

"Yeah, I think that's pretty much inevitable now I so brilliantly drew their attention," she said with a bitter sigh. She took out the dangly earrings and tossed them on the table.

"You know what the SGC tends to do with people good enough to figure it out…"

"Yeah, and that's what I'm not thrilled about. I'm not sure these guys are.." she gestured vaguely in the air, drawing her legs up underneath her. "Suitable."

"A SpecOps team that can dig deep enough to find out about the SGC? I'd think they would jump on the chance to recruit them."

"I don't mean skillwise unsuitable. Look… I've got a lot of time for these guys. They saved my ass back then, and I'm pretty sure it was only because of Clay's report that the SGC took an interest in me."

"It was pretty glowing," Darren agreed.

Lee glanced over at Brad.  
"You can read it sometime, if you like."

He blinked in surprise, because glowing as the report might be about her, he was pretty sure it had been a truly horrible experience that she didn't enjoy thinking or talking about.

"I just…" she went on before he could respond, like she wasn't sure if she wanted an answer, "…feel I owe it to Major Lorne, stalwart defender of our collective sanity and our fellow asses-out-of-the-fire-puller, to not bring aboard any additional suicidal maniacs."

Brad huffed a laugh, because they all knew who she was referring to here.

"Those guys would have made _great_ first wavers. I'm not convinced that they're the type of team we need in current day Atlantis. You know, the city that isn't daily wall-to-wall desperation anymore."

They each booted up their laptops, preparing to spend another night surfing the internet. AR4 knew how to party, when it was Earthside.

"Hmm. In any event, I think a standing notation with the Digital OpSec team at the Mountain is probably in order," Darren said finally. "Just to make sure they know to send a polite invitation to come over and sign an 800 page non-disclosure document."

"…instead of a van," Brad finished. "Because that? Would not go well."

"Not at all," Lee agreed on a sigh.


	2. Chapter 2

"So, Jensen. You got any more of those good ideas of yours?" Roque asked idly.

Jensen paused his monologue about conspiracy theories he'd found about this place and rounded on Roque.

"It worked, didn't it? We're totally in the door - well, down the super secret elevator into the deep - and they're getting Lily Brittner for us."

"Next time you've got a hare-brained plan like this, let me know in advance so that when they call me to pick you up, I can be in Bogota or something," Clay said, aware of the surveillance camera in the corner.

 

They'd gotten Max. Better not to ask how, really. The team had been reinstated - sort of. They could legally be in the country without risking arrest, but there had been no public clearing of names, and there wouldn't be. Their continued existence - and the whole Max thing - had thoroughly embarrassed several very high up political players, and the team was now in a strange sort of limbo where the army mostly seemed to want to forget the Losers existed. They'd all spent a few months enjoying leave, but then most of them - Pooch was still at home enjoying being a full-time dad and husband - had started to itch for a mission.

In other words, they were _bored_. And while Clay was very well acquainted with the need to keep Jensen occupied - nobody wanted Jensen to make his own entertainment - he wasn't used to being bored himself. He'd been sent to DC for a meeting about a mission, which had been supposedly cancelled. More likely been given to another team. Yet _another_ brushoff. His hands had _itched_ for something to do.

So when Roque had bumped into Lily Brittner, who so clearly wasn't who she had been and was still supposed to be, he'd been intrigued. And when Jensen had pitched the mystery the next day… Apparently there were records of the recently promoted Captain Lily Brittner flying from and to Okinawa by way of Peterson Airbase, but nothing to suggest that she was ever actually in Japan. Her only creditcard purchases were in the Colorado Springs Starbucks (daily, for a few short periods a year) and occasional online purchases that were sent to the NORAD bunker under Cheyenne Mountain. To all appearances she worked and lived at the underground base, which was weird in itself for a Flight Nurse, but she was also drawing continuous hazard pay and had been ever since the SERE course five years ago. Intriguing.

Cheyenne Mountain had some significant and very interesting rumours connected to it. And not nearly all of them could be explained by that Wormhole Xtreme tv-series Roque was secretly fond of. It had seemed like a nice little mystery to look into, something fun for a team of people whose triumphant return home had been far from triumphant.

Famous last words.

 

They'd started with surveillance on the entry/exit route of the base, intending to bump into Lily in the Starbucks and sit down for another chat. Nothing high pressure, but the caginess of the reaction they got would help decide on their further strategy.

Then she hadn't come back out of the mountain for days. Evidently, Jensen had, instead of relieving Cougar on surveillance duty, talked the other man into something more proactive.

Which was how Clay had been called by an irritated USAF Major to come collect his wayward hacker and sniper.

Which was why he and Roque had been subjected to some seriously invasive security checks - they had found ALL of Roques knives, even the ceramic boot knife - and had been taken on a long elevator ride into the depths of the mountain. All they'd been able to see was concrete hallways, airmen guarding corners, now the world's barest conference room. There were chairs, a table, a security camera in the corner and a firmly locked door to keep them company as they waited.

They were waiting for Lily Brittner. Because apparently just after they'd made it down the long, long airshaft and just before they'd gotten shot with some mysterious stun weapon, Jensen had declared they'd come to rescue her.

Clay had to admit it had been inspired, because it had apparently convinced the grim-faced USAF Major in charge of security that he'd better produce the woman in question. Presumably Jensen had been convincing in his declaration that they wouldn't rest until they knew she was safe and there of her own free will.

Clay and Roque had been there for five hours. Jensen and Cougar had regained consciousness four and a half hours ago. There was literally nothing in the room apart from the furniture and some bottled water and AirForce issue protein bars. Jensen's attempts at I Spy had resulted in threats from Roque in such a tone that for once the guy had actually stopped without another word. Bashing on the door and demanding to use the toilet had led to stone-faced airmen escorting him the ten metres to the toilet on the other side of the hallway.

A USAF Lieutenant had come in with stacks of 55-page non-disclosure agreements, and reading through them had at least kept them busy for an hour or so. They'd signed, because apparently it was that or have Jensen and Cougar in a shitload of trouble for attempting to break into a secure facility.

Demands for information - because Christ, how long did it take to find the woman and drag her out of whatever highly classified thing she was doing? - was met with a reply that Captain Brittner was not currently available, but was expected to become available sometime in the next four hours.

"I just hope she isn't getting her ass chewed out over Operational Security," Roque said. "Not her fault she ran into a team of chronically nosy fuckers."

"When _did_ you and her bond, anyway?" Jensen asked Roque, apparently made curious by any form of concern coming from Roque.

Clay hadn't been as surprised as the rest of the team. He'd known Roque longer and  knew a little more about his childhood than they did. Roque had a short fuse and could be an intimidating guy. He definitely wouldn't be mistaken for the world's most patient man, but he had a soft spot for people who'd been pushed far beyond their limits. Lily Brittner, when they'd first met her, had brought out some protective instincts.  

 

Back then they'd been near the border on the Pakistan side, doing the kind of cleanup mission that had always been a staple in their repertoire. They'd gotten orders to cross the border into Afghanistan and locate the crash site of a MEDEVAC chopper that had been shot down. Assess if there was anybody left to rescue (it hadn't seemed likely) or if it should be a recovery mission. The two rescue attempts so far had both come under fire, a subsequent firing mission hadn't found any targets, and until the artillery in that area had been disabled, Command wasn't willing to risk more lives. Locating the firing position had become part of the Losers' mission.

Command had wanted to know first if anybody was even left alive up there, and it had been a long hike up a craggy mountainside to find the crash site. The Pave Hawk had crashed but not exploded, which hadn't made a difference for the two dead they found inside the wreck, or the one right next to it. He looked like he'd been pulled out and then died, laid out on his back with his eyes closed. There had been eight people aboard though, and there were footprints and dragging trails toward a nearby cave.

The cave networks in these mountains ran deep, with many branches and smaller spaces. Inside it was pitch dark.

Most of the time the team used standard NVGs, because terrain contrast was what they needed out in the open. Cougar had a thermal scope for his rifle, and Roque and Jensen carried thermal vision goggles. They put them on, the three of them leading.

Another few steps brought a human shape into view, no more than a few steps away from him. It took a moment for the vague lines he could see surrounding the shape to make sense - thermal goggles didn't show you were the rock walls were. It looked like somebody had crammed themselves into a narrow crevice, face turned away against the rock. Roque ghosted closer, then suddenly switched his torch on in their face. He caught just a glimpse of wide, light eyes in a blood-streaked face before the punch came wild and wide.

He'd almost just stood there, because there was little strength behind it, but he'd reflexively caught the arm by the elbow to block it. Which turned out to be a very lucky thing, because after he'd spun the assailant with their back against his chest and into a tight control hold, he discovered there was a scalpel in that hand. Roque cursed under his breath. The scalpel had been soot-blackened in fire to make it almost invisible in the low light, and held in an underhanded grip that wild punch would have pulled the scalpel across his throat.

Clay pried it out of the hand, only then paying attention to the rest of the silently struggling figure. There wasn't a lot of strength to the resistance, and Roque's grip wrenched back her shoulder and pushed her head down, chin against her chest. Greasy shoulderlength hair hung around her face. Clay raised his torch to look at the scorched, stained uniform.

Aeromed Evac Squadron patches. Lieutenant bar.

"Brittner," he squinted at the blood-stained name tape.

From what he remembered of the crew list they'd been read, Lt. Lily Brittner was the flight nurse. Roque nodded.

"Let's go outside," Clay said with a nod at Roque, who handed the thermal goggles to Pooch. Then, to the other three, "Check out the nearby caves. Don't get stabbed, but try not to shoot anybody, either."

That normally invited a cheeky 'Sure boss' from Jensen, but everybody looked grim, silent. Not at all optimistic about what and who else they might find.

"I don't know who you thought I was, but we've come to get you out of here," Roque said. Though he could hazard a guess - the Taliban fighters who had shot down the chopper would want to check out their handiwork at some point, so that's probably who she'd been expecting. He could feel the pounding heartbeat under the hand he had in her neck, the fast, flat breathing. "I'm gonna let you go, and then we're gonna walk outside to talk, yeah?"

The woman made a small sound he chose to interpret as assent, and he let go of her. She started to fall almost immediately, and he made a reflexive grab for the back of her uniform to keep her upright.

"I'm Major Clay. This is Captain Roque," Clay began when they were back in the daylight. He grimaced when he saw how bad she looked. Her face had a grey tone under the grime, and there were fresh tear tracks over her cheeks. Dried blood covered the side of her face from hairline and down into her collar.

Some of the blood on her uniform might not be her own, but given how much of her being upright was owed to Roque's grip on her uniform collar, he wouldn't bet on how much of it. The left side of her trousers was blackened and partially burnt away, and - Christ, that was a big burn. Seemed to run from her hip all the way to her knee, like she'd been sitting next to the fire before she could get away.

He felt a wash of burning rage for those who would shoot down a clearly marked medical transport.

Roque got her sitting on the ground, back against the rock wall and legs stretched out, and kneeled down next to her to unpack his med kit.

"Sitrep, Lieutenant," Clay said. She flinched, and he took a step back, belatedly realising that he had the light behind him, that he was a faceless, looming shape to her. He made an effort to pitch his voice a little gentler. "Can you tell me what happened?"

She avoided his eyes.

"I think you'll get more inside, sir," Roque said, not looking up from his med kit. "I'll handle this."

Clay nodded. Roque was their designated medic, and that was what she needed right now. He hoped there would be more information about the remaining helo passengers inside.

 

"All right, let's start with some painkiller, yeah?" Roque said when Clay had gone back into the cave. That burn had to be agony.

Her hand shot out to latch on to his wrist, and he stilled.

"Yes painkiller?" No reaction. "No painkiller?" she squeezed. "Okay, why not? You're not in pain?" she huffed a breath, curling in on herself a little as if it hurt. "You've already taken something?" Another squeeze.

Roque gently detached her hand from his wrist and put the syringe back into his kit. Well, at least she was communicating.

"What have you been using?"

She indicated the canteen that was clipped to her belt, and he unclipped it so he could examine the contents. It was some kind of terrible smelling cold tea, with plant bits still floating in it.

"Poppy tea?" There were fields of poppies close by. "Right. We'll have to wait until it's all the way worn off before I can give you anything else."

That was the crap part about improvised pain medication. The dosage was imprecise at best and you could never be sure it was out of the system unless you let the pain come back full-force first. From the expression on her face he thought she'd already realised that. Still, she'd have to come off of it anyway, and better here than the doctors having to delay treatment once she got to the hospital.

 

"Two alive but injured, four bodies, sir," Pooch reported inside the caves. When Clay raised his eyebrow, because there should only have been four people apart from Brittner, he nodded toward the area where they'd found Brittner. "Two Taliban guys in a passage just off there, bled out. Blood's not dried up yet. Two chopper crew - one looks like he's been dead a few days, the other one's more--" Pooch grimaced.

"Recent," Cougar supplied, crossing himself. The last body was still next to the two injured people, as if wrapping it in a foil blanket and rolling it away a few metres was the most Brittner had been able to manage.

"How critical are the two injured?"

"Both unconscious. One of the guys has a broken leg and ribs and some burns, the other a head injury, hard to tell how bad," Jensen said. "I found two med kits and both are completely out of drugs, so maybe she's been keeping them under on purpose. Oh yeah, and there's about six empty IV bags, but no MRE wrappers or anything like that."

"She's got a huge burn, she might have been using IV fluid from keeping herself from going into shock," Clay said.

"So basically, we need to take care of that anti-aircraft artillery post-haste," Pooch summarised. "All these people needed to be medevacced yesterday."

"More like five days ago," Clay sighed, motioning for them to come outside with him.  

 

Roque tried to catch her eyes, but she wouldn't meet his gaze.

"Lieutenant," he said in a low tone. "I need to know if you're injured apart from that burn. Can you tell me where all that blood came from?"

She had a bloody bump in her hairline that needed cleaning, but half her uniform shirt was soaked and it hadn't all come from there. Some of it was dry and probably days old, but some of it was still wet, though he didn't see any spreading patches.

She made a frustrated gesture and tilted her head back with a grimace, and he saw the bruising on her throat. Large finger-shaped bruises. Okay, no wonder she wasn't saying anything.

"Is the blood from whoever did that?" he asked, almost grinning. He shouldn't, really - this was almost certainly the worst week of her life. Grinning, even though it was because she'd obviously managed to strike back at the fuckers and that made him feel all warm and fuzzy inside, might be misinterpreted.

Her head was still tilted back against the rock wall, as if she was too tired and sore to hold it up. She gave a slow blink, which was probably the least painful affirmative she could manage right now.

"Okay. Going to clean your face now," he announced before he cupped a hand behind her head to keep her in place. He wasn't exactly known for his bedside (roadside.. Humvee-side..) manner, but he was making an effort to announce what he was doing. The past five days had clearly strained her to breaking point, but wasn't so out of it she couldn't seriously hurt herself if she freaked out.

It took a bit of work to get the dried blood off her face. He cautiously examined the source of the blood, but it didn't need stitches and it had stopped bleeding, so apart from disinfecting it he left it alone.

He wiped the rest of her face clean too. She held her eyes closed and he got the impression she was trying to pretend none of this was happening. He was kind of glad about that, because this kind of care held a sort of intimacy he didn't really know what to do with, and he was relieved he didn't have to acknowledge the slow tears that were running down her face.

She looked startlingly young once her face was clean. Given her position she had to be at least in her mid twenties, but right now she looked about sixteen. She was running a low-grade fever, and the dark bruises on her throat and lank hair framing her face made her look vulnerable in a way that made it hard to look at her. It filled him with a vague, ineffectual rage at the universe. For letting something like this happen to somebody like her, somebody who had never been trained for anything like this. She should never have been put into a position where this could happen to her.

"I'm going to see what I can do for that burn," he said.

She made a soft sound of acknowledgement, and he got to work.

 

Clay and the others came back out of the caves when Roque was about finished cleaning the burn and covering it with metallic gauze pads. It was an ugly burn, 2nd and 3rd degree in parts, and all the more nasty for not having received adequate treatment. It was also beginning to infect. He would have expected that sooner, but maybe she'd managed to scavenge some antibiotics from the crash site and kept it at bay until now. He gave her more from his kit, but it was the kind of stop-gap fix (if it was even that) that she'd already had to employ too many of in the past five days.

He went over to Clay and the rest of the team, and got a quick update on the situation inside the caves.

"All right, Losers," Clay said. "Let's terminate bastards who shoot at MEDEVAC choppers with extreme prejudice. Pooch, do a crash analysis and see if you can work out where the attack might have come from. Cougar, work out the best vantage points for surveillance. I want to use infrared tonight. It's going to be fucking freezing, and if they're in the caves down there somewhere we might be able to see the heat from a fire.

Jensen, update command on the situation here. Since we don't want more people to die up here, I want to know if they'll send us a fly-by to bait these guys out. Roque, medic duty. I want to know how those two guys inside are doing. It doesn't look like anybody here has eaten much of anything over the past few days, so we need to get some fluids in at least, some food if we can."

"Right," Roque agreed. "Ratfuck your MREs, guys, I'm gonna need all the electrolytes, apple butter, fruit packs and peanut butter you've got."

"Aww, man."

"I," Clay said, before things could devolve into an argument about the necessity of handing over their most prized MRE contents, "will deal with the bodies."

 

By nightfall they had a reasonable idea from which valley the shots had been fired, and perches picked out for surveillance. If there would be any activity down there tonight, they'd see it.

Inside the cave the bodies had been dealt with - the Talibs dragged deeper into the side cave and covered, the others wrapped carefully and laid in the coldest part of the cave Clay had been able to find, ready for recovery.

They'd scavenged some more from the crash site; a couple of blankets hadn't been too badly burnt, and it was going to get cold overnight.

The guy with the broken leg and ribs - Corporal Brock - was awake and drinking warm electrolytes and eating crackers. It turned out he'd been one of the soldiers getting medevacced when the helo went down. Perhaps having been strapped to a stretcher at the time had helped him survive impact, because his only new damage was the broken ribs and some relatively minor burns. There was a neat list in sharpie on the inside of his arm, detailing oral painkillers and shots of antibiotics.

The guy with the head injury was Captain Rosales, the other medic on board. He was strapped tightly to a stretcher. Brock said Rosales had been concussed but lucid directly after the crash, and that Brittner had been more worried about the obvious spinal trauma. Given that Roque put the Captain at about a 6 on the Glasgow Coma Scale, that situation had obviously changed. Brock hadn't seen the guy awake for a while, but he admitted he'd been in and out of consciousness himself and had lost all sense of time.

"How's Brittner?" Brock asked.

Roque hesitated a moment, because 'Okay' was sort of true, and also a spectacular lie. He wasn't sure she'd ever be okay again.

"Alive, conscious," he settled on. "As well as can be expected."

She'd fallen asleep where she sat, and it had been sheltered enough, out of the wind and with sun-warmed rock at her back, so he'd left her there. Given that the poppy tea was making its way out of her system, he was inclined to leave her alone if she'd found even a modicum of comfort. The few times they'd seen her eyes open Roque and Clay had given her packets of apple butter and cheese spread to squeeze into her mouth, wanting to get as much nutrition into her as possible for every painful swallow. She'd even mostly stopped flinching back from them, though she still seemed intimidated by Clay.

"She talking?"

"Her throat is pretty heavily bruised. She talk before..?" he gestured in the direction of the cave where they'd found the two Talib.

"Not since Hendricks…" Brock looked over to where the body had lain and grimaced.

Sergeant Hendricks had had a gutshot, the kind of thing that would become a problematic infection in a hospital and a slow, painful death sentence outside of it. Roque wondered if that was where the six ampoules of morphine had gone.

 

They did rotating shifts overnight, three of them outside holding surveillance on the valley, one sitting with the wounded, one asleep. It was toward the end of Roque's turn to sleep that he was woken by a strangled cry.

He jolted upright to find Cougar crouched in front of Brittner, holding her hands and talking in quiet, low Spanish. She seemed to be trying to have her panic attack quietly. She made high-pitched whimper sounds as she tried to dig her shoulderblades into the rock wall behind her, which Roque privately thought might be worse than screaming.

Her fever had spiked, and by his calculations it had been time for pain relief a couple of hours ago when he'd come in from surveillance. She'd been asleep and he hadn't wanted to wake her; every hour they could stretch it lowered the chance of accidentally overdosing her.

"Lily. How much morphine?" Roque asked her, because even half out of her mind she still had a lot more medical training than he did, plus a better sense of her own tolerance levels.  

"T-t-ten-ten-ten," she forced out through chattering teeth.

She was shaking so hard Cougar had to hold her arm still so Roque could inject her, but she calmed fast after that, breathing evening out. He gave her another shot of antibiotics as well. The dosage and time he wrote on her arm with sharpie, which made her quirk a dopey smile. Then he warned Cougar to keep an eye on her respiration rate - the morphine could depress it - and managed another twenty minutes sleep before it was watch change.

 

 _Command has **finally** agreed, guys, we're getting a baiting run_ Jensen's voice came through the radio just after 0400 hours. Apparently command hadn't wanted to risk having to wait another night.

An hour later all five of the Losers were in lookout positions, each covering a sector to maximise the chance they'd spot the target when it would show itself. The Apache did a distant run first, close enough to be heard, far enough to not be an easy target. Nothing moved down in the valley.

 _So is Cougar putting the fuckers down or are we calling in a firing mission to bomb the shit outta this valley?_ Jensen asked. _Because I'm not sure a **nuke** would accurately express the depths of my disappointment with their actions_

 _Porque no los dos?_ Cougar said quietly.

Clay huffed a laugh.

_Cougar, if you have a shot, take it. If they don't hear their buddies start firing, more of them might come outside. Then the Apache can do its thing._

_And then we go down to clean up_ , Roque asserted.

 _As soon as we've got these people on a helo to base_ , Clay agreed.

 _Boss, chopper's coming back for a closer run_ , Jensen said.

 _Let's hope they're not so bright as to only come out for medevac choppers,_ Pooch said. Then, after a minute of tense silence, _I've got 'em! Somebody bring me the painter, I've got eyes on the bastards!_

Jensen came over with the laser target painter and Cougar ran over with his rifle, getting into position to fire.

 _Sharkbait, this is Hammer_ , Clay radioed. _Maintain your distance. We want to draw them out so our sniper can pick them off._

 

Jensen put both arms in the air in celebration, a dark silhouette against the fiery glow of the destruction in the valley.

"HAMMERTIME! YEAH!" he called out.

"L-let me guess," Roque heard somewhere behind him. He whirled around to find Lt. Brittner there, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She looked flushed and feverish, but maybe the cold air outside was lovering her temperature a little, because she seemed more or less lucid, if glassy-eyed. She'd obviously kept her distance before she spoke, wary of his reflexes. Sensible. "H-he got to pick the c-callsign?" she finished.

Her voice was soft and hoarse. It sounded painful, but he was pleased to see communicative. He thought getting some food into her had probably helped. He was a little less pleased to see her here, almost a hundred metres from the cave. A long enough walk that if she'd become unwell, especially in the dark, it would have been a problem to find her.

"Yes, he did," he grinned.   

"Lieutenant? What are you doing here?" Clay said, coming up to them. He looked satisfied.  

"C-came for the view," she said under her breath, eyes fixed on the distant fire behind him.

 

Actually, given that was the strongest impression she had left on him - the grim satisfaction on her face, lit by the fiery glow in the distance - Clay wasn't all that surprised she'd had a career change. 

The medevac helo had come by lunchtime, and she'd been giving a hoarse-voiced and possibly not entirely lucid handover to the medics when the Losers had shouldered their packs and trooped down the path into the valley.

Clay hadn't given her much more thought after he'd written his report. Jensen had, at some point, mentioned that Brock was a taxi driver now, that Rosales was still in a care home with little hope of further recovery, and that Brittner hadn't taken a medical discharge after her ordeal as they had assumed she would. She'd gotten the Air Force Cross for the Afghanistan situation, and been selected as the first female candidate to go through SERE. That had hinted at interesting developments, but that was five years ago and he'd forgotten all about her until she'd sat down at their table in the bar.


	3. Chapter 3

Clay had been surprised to see the woman appearing at Roque's side, and it had taken a moment to recognise her. The short hair and much needed weight and muscle on her frame were a change. She'd looked relaxed and amused, and that Recon Marine looming behind her…

Maybe that had grabbed his attention most of all - not just that the guy was there, but the way they _moved_ together. It didn't say 'friend' or 'lover'. If you knew how to look, it said 'backup' and 'through hell and back'. It was the same way Clay and Roque moved together in theatre, knowing where the other was without looking.

Then there was the way the guy had looked at all of them. A civilian wouldn't have seen the threat assessment being made, but Clay was too used to making his own not to see the Marine do it. Roque had rated highest - he'd had the most freedom of movement, and Clay thought the guy had probably spotted Roque's concealed knives. Then Clay, then Jensen, who hadn't been dismissed, but was at the back of the booth.

All that he'd seen the guy assess inside of a few seconds. It was what had convinced Clay he wasn't just a Marine - the haircut alone gave it away - but Reconnaissance, and experienced too. At least a Sergeant, probably a Staff Sergeant. 

Interestingly, whatever the Marine had seen was evidently weighed against the fact that Lily - he still wasn't sure where her first name had crept in - seemed pleasantly surprised to have run into them. The Marine - Brad - had moved like her security detail, but he'd clearly weighed his assessment against hers and gone with hers.

And what Marine PSD would do that?

He was either her boyfriend, which she'd denied, and they didn't have that vibe - or her long time security detail. And why the hell a USAF.. nurse? Former nurse? would have, of all things, a Recon Marine as PSD…  Well, there was a reason Clay had allowed himself to get talked into this ill-advised fact-finding mission.

 

An airman opened the door just at the point Clay started to consider challenging Roque for the chance to strangle Jensen.

"I am aware of that, sir, I am merely--yes, sir. Of course. I will update you ASAP, sir." Lily Brittner's voice sounded in the hallway, a hint of aggravation in her tone. 

She walked in, looking as if she'd just stepped out of a field mission. Green BDUs, the shirt dusty and mud-splattered except for where it had obviously been covered by a tac vest. Her short hair stood up in spikes, as if she'd absently run her hands though it a few times, and there was a horizontal smudge on her forehead that suggested she'd been wearing a helmet. She looked tired, a little tight around the eyes and like sleep had been a while ago.

Her thigh holster and knife clip were empty - she must have handed off weapons before she came in here, but she seemed to have no problem with being in the room with them without backup. Given how on guard everybody had been around the Losers so far, he was a little surprised. Maybe she was just confident of the airmen waiting just outside the door, but from the way she didn't seem to mind Cougar standing in her blind spot, Clay didn't think so.

He wasn't sure if it was arrogance to think they wouldn't harm her - it seemed presumptuous to rely on their previous connection. Then again, even if they had been thinking about a breakout, _he_ didn't think any of them would touch her either, so maybe not.

"Gentlemen," she said on a huff of breath. A little exasperated, a little amused. "Can't say I'm terribly surprised to see you here."

"We pull you out of a mission?" Roque asked, giving her an assessing look.

"Training exercise," she said, kicking out a chair opposite them and sitting down at the table. She smelled of grass and wet earth and recently fired firearms. "Yeah, there's a couple of people not too thrilled with your existence right now. That exercise was two months in the making."

Clay suddenly wondered if part of the long delay before anybody spoke to them was because people had been digging through the their files. He wasn't used to people having full access to his record, but he thought maybe this operation, whatever the hell it was, probably did. It made him feel uncomfortably exposed. 

"Where's your Recon shadow?" he asked mildly.

"Taking care of some training," she said.

"Not your friend, then."

"Oh, he is." The quirk of her mouth reminded him that she had been observing them in turn. "Just also my team sergeant."

"Right." That made no sense at all. The US Air Force had the Army to do its dirty work. The Navy used Marines. A USAF officer and a Marine Corps sergeant on one team made no sense in Clay's universe.

Clay noticed the patches of clean velcro on her BDU shirt where she'd removed unit and mission patches they weren't meant to see. There was one that had been left on though.

 _Huh_.

"Combat Rescue Officer. So that's what you're using the SERE training for," he said.

She wasn't very expressive, but he got the impression she was surprised that he'd accepted that so easily. Probably was used to more resistance. Clay had been doing black ops for a long time though, and he'd seen plenty of shit that wasn't officially supposed to happen. Women filling roles they weren't officially supposed to be in didn't even make the list.

"So, you're here breaking into a classified base, and I'm here instead of in a big SRE drill, because you're worried about me," she summarised, with a glance at Jensen that made it clear she didn't believe a word of it.

"You did seem a little spooked when we met," Jensen pointed out guilelessly.

"I guess the first line of defence is to conceal there's anything to defend," she nodded thoughtfully. "And that's hard to maintain with people who first met me like you guys did. But hey," she clapped her hands together with false, bright cheer and got up. "I'm fine, you've signed the right paperwork, so let's get you topside and we can all get on with our lives."

None of them made a move to get up.

She rubbed a hand over her face, looking weary and like she was eager to move on, but Clay didn't think they were seeing anything they weren't meant to see. Considering that, he looked at her uniform again. She looked like she'd walked straight out of an op. Surely, as long as the team had already been sitting in that bare room, nobody would have cared about letting them wait another twenty minutes while she showered and changed? Which meant they were meant to see her like this.

"Where was your exercise?" Roque said, sounding like he was thinking along the same lines.

"Can't tell you that."

"We're pretty sure you haven't been out of the mountain in days, not even for Starbucks," Jensen pointed out.

"Mm. Base coffee's improved lately."

Clay almost laughed, because _that_ was so blatant a lie that she was practically inviting them to keep going.

"How's the coffee in Okinawa?" he asked.

She wrinkled her nose, and Jensen took the cue to ask her about Oki, the base there and what she'd seen of Japan. Clay had been to Okinawa, but Jensen had been stationed there for 18 months before he joined the team.

She sounded comfortable and confident answering the questions, but from Jensen's tone Clay read that while she might have visited - or been briefed very thoroughly - she hadn't been in Japan for the past four years like her record claimed. 

Of course, they already knew that, and she clearly knew that they knew it.

He was trying to think of a way to get the conversation back to the interesting part without provoking her into leaving, when the door opened, revealing a USMC Gunnery Sergeant. Unlike the airmen and other personnel they've seen, who were all in green BDUs, the man was wearing dark grey fatigues.

Lily didn't look surprised, merely accepted a stack of documents with a "Thanks Gunny."

The Marine threw an assessing look around the room and raised an eyebrow at Lily. She gave a minute nod, and he left.

The guys watched her silently, because… had she been waiting for the papers? Had she cued some watcher that she wanted them? There was obviously something pre-meditated going on here and they weren't in on the plan, and the Losers did _not_ like not being in on the plan.

She gave him a challenging eyebrow raise, dumped the stack of papers on the table, and sat back down.

"What are those?" Jensen wanted to know, after what was really the maximum amount of time Jensen could be silent apart from when they were on an op. (56 seconds)

"Non disclosure agreements," she said.

"We already signed non disclosure agreements," Jensen pointed out.

"Those were just for what you've seen so far, and would see on your way out of the base," she said. She was wearily patting down her cargo pockets, and apparently not finding what she was looking for, eyed up the remaining protein bars in the bowl on the table. Roque saw, and tossed her one. She ate it in silence, letting them stew on the implications for a while.

32 seconds later - Clay counted - Jensen lunged for the papers. Before he'd even fully come into motion Roque had his hand clamped around the younger man's shoulder.

"Let me--gimme a pen!"

The corner of Brittner's lip quirked upward a little. She slid one of the thickly bound folders over to Jensen, who opened it.

"Employment contract," he read out loud, and blinked.

"That's the hitch," Lily said into the silence. "I can't tell you more about the operation until you've signed up."

"Really? You expect us to sign that on no more basis than that we're curious what's going on here?" Roque asked.

"Well, there's also that it's pretty much guaranteed to be the most interesting thing you'll ever do in your life," she said, contemplatively. "And that includes all the stuff in your files that didn't officially happen. And the part where you get to stay together as a team."

Clay didn't allow his expression to change, but suddenly the others were looking at him.

"We're getting broken up?" Jensen said, a hint of real dismay in the line of his shoulders.

Most of the Losers weren't going to win awards for interpersonal relationship skills. Except maybe Pooch, though a big part of Pooches successful marriage was that Jolene was fucking _fantastic_. Pooch freely admitted to that. None of them would do well when thrown into another team.

Cougar would probably stop speaking all together. Jensen wouldn't last long because nobody but the Losers seemed to get that amidst the bullshit and the endless rambling, he was invaluably skilled and observant. His new team would ignore him, and they'd probably all die because of it.

Roque might well actually kill somebody if none of the Losers were around the next time he was faced with locker room talk about what some fucked up soldier would like to do to his ex.

And Clay? He felt impossibly weary at the idea of a new team. Maybe he'd just retire. Buy a farm. Start a garden, grow his own kale. Kale was supposed to be healthy, right? He could do yoga in his garden and watch his kale grow. Yeah. Sounded good. More likely, die in a bar fight somewhere (or at the hands of a woman he'd pissed off) because his self-destructive tendencies didn't care he didn't have a team at his back anymore.

"It hasn't been said out loud," Clay admitted after a long moment, trying to shove the gloomy thoughts down. It had just been hinted at every time a mission had passed them by because they were 'unsuitable' for the first time in the existence of the team.

"Yet," Roque said, challenging. "It hasn't been said out loud _yet_."

Clay shot him a look, not needing to hear this from his XO.

He'd gotten them home, sort of, eventually. 'Home' just wasn't the same anymore. They'd come back from the dead.

Clay's important stuff had gone to his sister, so he had at least some things left once he'd finished apologising and hugging her. Pooch had had a hell of a lot to make up for with Jolene, but his life had mostly been intact. Jensen's life - apart from his sister and niece - was mostly digital, so he hadn't lost too much he cared about. Cougar had family, who'd presumably claimed his personal belongings.

But Roque… Roque didn't have anybody, and his flat had been cleared out after he'd been declared dead. His landlord had sold off what he'd recognised as valuable - the collection of antique ceremonial knives and daggers Roque had collected over the course of his military career - and thrown away what he hadn't - the set of old, non-matching and carefully repaired dinner plates that were the only thing Roque had had left of the only foster parent he had ever kept in touch with.

Roque had longed for home and returned to absolutely nothing. Clay still hated himself for not recognising it at the time. Hated that he hadn't seen that behind Roque's mutinous anger about the delay, about biding their time until they could strike back at Max, was the knowledge that whatever meagre roots he'd manage to lay for himself were disappearing. In the eight months since they'd gotten back, Roque hadn't bothered to look for another apartment. He'd just lived in a bare barracks room like all the years before he'd managed to carve out that little attempt at a home for himself.

Things would never go back to how they'd been before Bolivia. Not for them personally, and not as a team. They'd upset too many important people.

"We're nobody's favourite unit right now," he admitted finally.

"My General is confident he can get you signed over to us," Lily said quietly. "And we don't break up cohesive units if they function well."

"So what would we be doing?"

"Not so much wetwork. You'd probably start with mostly tactical missions, and after a learning period that would expand into explorative and humanitarian type work."

Clay didn't bother hiding his offended frown. They may not be in favour of the higher ups anymore, but his team was still an elite SpecOps unit. He didn't appreciate the implication that they'd have to start low and work their way up.

Lily tilted her head slightly and quirked a smile.

"There is a reason for that hazard pay, you know."

There was a tense silence, broken only when Cougar pushed off from his spot against the wall, sat down at the table, and pulled one of the files toward him to read. For somebody who rarely spoke, Cougar could have a hell of an influence on their collective mood.

"We have a fifth team member," Roque said, sounding like he was considering doing the same as Cougar. "We can't make decisions for him."

And if the four of them did sign, Pooch would be forced to either sign or stay behind.

"I don't want you to sign this today," she said. "Signing up for this mission will radically change your life and your worldview. I want you all to take at least a day to think about it. You can talk to Sergeant Porteous, too."

"All of this still without information on what the hell we'd be signing on for," Roque asserted.

She gave a little 'what can you do?' gesture.

"Why don't you guys look through the contract and talk about this for a bit? I'll come back in half an hour, and I'll answer what questions I'm able to."

 

Ten minutes later an airman brought in a tray with a thermos of coffee, and cups. Apparently being upgraded to potential recruit (rather than unwelcome intruder) brought an increase in hospitality.

The coffee was fucking _awful_.

Being men who occasionally resorted to pouring instant coffee crystals directly into their mouths, the Losers drank it anyway.

"You know, there's a persistent rumour that there's some sort of portal here," Jensen said after a surprisingly long contemplative silence. "And I think a lot of it is just wishful rumours inspired by Wormhole Xtreme, because that would be the coolest thing _ever_ and yay for instantaneous space travel, but…"

"She was in the mountain," Cougar said. "We saw her go in. She had not come out."

"Yeah," Jensen agreed. "So… where was that training exercise?"

"She could have left through another exit, or been in a closed vehicle," Roque pointed out.

"Maybe, but it hasn't rained in weeks. Not a lot of mud around here anywhere. What if there is a portal and she was - I don't know, wherever she spends all that time she isn't making daily Starbucks runs here? What if they're running ops in.. " he waved a hand. "Fuck, South America, Russia, the Middle East. Just think of it, being able to put people _anywhere_ , no flights that can be spotted or traced, no messy extraction procedures.. They appear, they do their thing, they disappear again without a trace."

"That is some next-level shit," Roque contemplated. 

 

"We need to talk to Pooch," Clay said after some more back and forth. Aware of the camera in the corner, they weren't letting too much show of the level of interest. "Find out if he'd be up for it or if he wants to stay close by home from now on."

Given their current status with their superiors, there might not be much in the way of choice. Clay thought if they stayed where they were, the Losers would probably get ignored until they got too loud about their situation, then sent on something with a near-certain death rate. Command in this place knew what they were doing by offering them a place as a team.

 

When Lily returned, she had showered - her hair stood up in wet spikes - and she was in dark grey BDUs like the ones the Marine Sergeant had worn. Anybody else they'd seen so far was in green, so that was interesting.

She'd apparently also taken a look at their records, because she was up to date on their training, asking about specific skills as if she had a picture in her head she was matching them to. It was another one of those plans they weren't let in on - at least not right now - and it put Clay on edge.

"We have been a highly functioning SpecOps team since-" he cut himself off before he could say something like 'we saved your ass', because antagonising her might ruin this opportunity before he could decide if he wanted it. "Before you even started training as CRO," he finished. "What makes you think we need additional training?"

"Colonel, in the AO we're talking about-"

" _Not_ talking about," Jensen corrected.

" _Everybody_ needs additional training," she continued, unruffled. "Doesn't matter if you come on as cook or as field unit. Where I work, learning on the job means dying on the job. That's why we train people before they go out there."

It sounded dramatic, but the words 'continual hazard pay' played through his mind. She didn't seem like the type to overdraw dangers for effect; in fact in any other circumstance he would have pegged her as the understatement type. He just didn't like to think about what that might mean.

They talked some more about practicalities, utterly unsatisfying subjects as regards to what the hell this operation actually was, but it gave a bit more of a picture of what life would be like. They'd be stationed on a remote base in an unknown location, doing short missions; usually over in under a week. He wondered how the hell that worked. Lily seemed a little frustrated too; as if she really did want to tell them.

 

"What's with the different uniform?" Jensen asked. "You were wearing green before just as anybody else. But the Gunny also had these," he gestured at the grey BDUs.

"We are now at the SGC, and I was participating in an exercise with SGC personnel. The operation I work for is related, but isn't actually based here. This is just our stateside base of operation. We do knowledge exchanges and things like that, and a lot of our training is handled here."

"So you don't work here. Apart from a few weeks a year."

She nodded.

"But we would work here five months of the year, and five months wherever the hell you are based?" That was in the employment contract. It sounded like a pretty sweet deal, actually. If you ignored that there was a reason for the year-round hazard pay.

"Yeah. I could request that schedule, but I'd have to talk the rest of my team into it too. Right now we're all happy to be over there fulltime."

Huh. What the hell kind of base would that be?

"And you are going back to that place soon?"

"Monday, probably," she nodded.

 

"You ever.. regret it?" Cougar asked from where he was leaning against the wall. He'd been silent most of the conversation, as usual, but he was engaged, and clearly seemed to be considering the offer.

"Signing up for this operation?" Lily asked, turning to look at Cougar. She'd not addressed him directly before, but Clay didn't get the impression she'd dismissed or ignored him. Just that she was used to somebody observing from the sidelines and that she trusted he'd speak up if he needed to.

Cougar nodded.

"Apart from the occasional brief flash of mourning for the wonderful career I could have had as a librarian, not really."

Cougar huffed a silent laugh.

 

After an hour she concluded the conversation with "Sorry I can't be more informative."

Clay nodded. It was annoying to be kept in the dark, but they all understood OpSec.

"The contracts don't leave the base, but you can come back tomorrow to read them. I would suggest you take your time thinking and talking about this. The offer will stand for at least a couple of weeks."

"But?" Roque said suspiciously, because her body language said there was a 'but.'

"But, if you decide before Monday…" the corners of her lips quirked up, "Then I'm the one who gets to show you the cool stuff."

Roque chuckled. It was the first time she showed any personal enthusiasm about having them on board. So far she'd been friendly but professional, and she hadn't seemed particularly invested in getting them to sign. No hard sell here. That wasn't like any recruiter he'd ever met, though he supposed she wasn't a recruiter. He appreciated that she hadn't presumed on their previous acquaintance to talk them into something so apparently life-altering, but it was still good to see that she liked the idea of them signing on and sharing in her mysterious mission.

"Call this number when you're ready to come in," she said, jotting down a number. "Gunny Warszawski will pass on a message either to me or to the officer who'd handle you introduction. This place runs 24/7, so over the weekend is fine."

"Or we could just email you," Jensen pointed out, not needing to say that he'd found her email address. She used a gmail address that forwarded to l.brittner@sgc.atl.mil - an interesting domain he hadn't been able to trace further.

"You can, but after Monday it'll probably take me a few days to reply."

They said their goodbyes, and were escorted to the base entrance by airmen.

 

"Jesus Clay, did you need to rent a minivan?" Roque groused. He was driving, with Clay riding shotgun and Jensen and Cougar in the back. "I swear that soccer mom with the screaming kids in the back gave me a commiserating look."

"Thought it'd come in handy for surveillance," Clay said, staring out the window. He was half listening to Jensen's extensive breakdown of the rumours he'd read about the Cheyenne mountain base. There were a _lot_ of rumours. Some of them obviously crackpot conspiracy theories, but some of them he was maybe willing to pay a little more attention to now they'd talked to Lily Brittner. The portal thing was Jensen's favourite. Every cynical bone in Clay's body resisted the idea that something so outrageous could possibly be true - and that even if it were possible, that the military had somehow managed to keep a lid on it.

And yet…

He was tempted.

Jensen was definitely in. Cougar was hard to read, but just the fact that he'd asked questions indicated he was at least considering it. He was pretty sure Roque was on board. For somebody who liked to play up his Big Man, Short Fuse image, Roque was surprisingly intuitive and not prone to second guessing himself when he had a good feeling about something. 

Clay on the other hand was second guessing himself _because_ he had a good feeling about something. It had been pointed out to him more than once that a lot of his decisions about his personal life felt great, and then crashed and burned spectacularly.

It was just… something about Lily Brittner. Not an 'attractive and therefore probably insane' kind of something. She wasn't really his type ("Too sane?" the Roque voice in his head suggested.) Even if she had been, he had the image of her flinching away from him, half starving and looking so, _so_ young, etched too sharply into his mind to be attracted to her. But… It struck him suddenly that she'd looked comfortable in her skin, like she was at peace with the universe and her place in it.

Clay wanted that.

It was a state of being he had only occasionally achieved, and never for longer than about thirty seconds at a time.

She seemed content, like she was exactly where she wanted to be. He'd seen her record, because if Jensen looked somebody up, well, he didn't stop at the public records. Emancipating into the military on your 17th birthday wasn't usually done without reason. There was enough between the lines of the early test scores and health reports - not to mention in the interrogation notes from her SERE course - to know she was somebody for whom happiness had once been a very distant goal.

Wanting to see the place that seemed to make somebody that content - was that a bad reason to sign up? He hoped not.

 


	4. Chapter 4

"OK, we've signed!" Jensen announced when all five of them had laid down pens. "Now will you tell us the cool stuff?"

It was Sunday morning. Clay, Roque, Jensen and Cougar had been of one mind by the morning after their first trip down the mountain. Pooch had needed a few days. Jolene wasn't thrilled, but had ultimately decided that top secret missions with the Losers at her husband's back were better than top secret missions with a new team. She was settled where they lived right now and didn't want to give up her support network, but there was talk of maybe living in base housing for the five months the team would be working at the Mountain.

"Captain Galea here has to process the contracts first," Lily pointed out. She'd met them at the security checkpoint and escorted them to a conference room on the same floor as before - Clay thought, but everything was grey concrete and endless hallways - as where they'd been before, though a nicer one. The slightly heavyset man from Legal had then talked them through the contract point by point, which had taken over an hour. Lily had stayed in the room, but she was working on her tablet; from the glance he'd caught of her screen he thought she was doing online shopping.

Galea had equipment with him to take photos, voice recordings and fingerprints of the Losers.

"Man, so far this cool mission is mostly really boring," Jensen complained to Pooch in what he apparently thought was a confidential tone.

"It will take half an hour to clear them for the next stage," Galea said to Lily, ignoring Jensen. "I will radio you when I've changed the clearance level on the visitors passes."

"OK. The commissary is fine right now though, right?"

 

She led them through what felt like half a mile of concrete hallway, a short elevator ride, and then more hallways.

"You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike," Jensen muttered.

"¿Ya llegamos?" Cougar muttered.

"Not quite, but we can stop here for terrifyingly coloured jello," Lily answered Cougar, nodding to an open doorway.  

  
The commissary wasn't busy at this time of day, but it was clearly a place where personnel wandered in at any time and in any state of mind to wind down or fuel up. Which meant the people who were there weren't being careful to conceal their occupation from the newbies, like everybody they'd met so far had been.

Clay spotted a few techs, a lone Major in service uniform, and a group of four men - three military, one civilian - playing cards in a corner, plates of pie on the table. They were too far away to see their patches properly, but the people walking past were wearing a round one with SGC on it, and some of them had a patch with what seemed to be a representative of Earth with over it an A with a little circle above it.

Lily made a quiet radio call asking to use a room for 'show and tell,' but apparently got refused.

After half an hour of terrible coffee, Jensen trying ALL the jello colours, and people watching, Lily got the call from Captain Galea. A pair of airmen checked the visitor's passes the Losers were using and had them sign in. They went down to level -18.

 

During the elevator ride she took the two missing patches from a pocket and put them on her uniform. The mission patch was a winged horse with ATLANTIS over it. The unit patch said 'Atlantis Recon 4'.

"Really? That's what the mission is called?" Roque said in amusement.

"Uh-huh." There was a glint in her eyes, and Roque and Clay both grinned. Apparently they were about to get to the good parts.

-18 was apparently an office level. Lily stopped at a door with an ATLANTIS OFFICE sign on the door and went in with every sign of familiarity.

"Hey Paul, the conference room with a view is taken," she said, to what turned out to be the same Marine gunny they'd seen before. "Can we do the.." she made an upward gesture with her hand, palm up, "the thing?"

Gunny Warszawski did not seem at all surprised at the lack of intro, and Clay was left wondering if Lily was like this with every NCO or if she just happened to know both of the ones they'd met so far.

Then to the Losers, "Guys, this is Gunny Warszawski. He'll be overseeing a lot of your training here over the next month."

The Sergeant was in his early forties, with close-cropped grey hair and a craggy face, sun damage and wrinkles made worse by being obviously sleep deprived. Clay wondered how shifts here were set up for the guy to look like he hadn't slept in a week. There was a second desk in the office, but nobody currently working there.

Warszawski checked something on his monitor.

"I think the Hammond's back in geostatic orbit, I'll call. Do you want it ASAP?"

"Yeah, that'd be good."

Clay frowned. Orbit? Were they talking about a satellite?

The men looked around the office. The sergeant was wearing the same Atlantis mission patch as Lily, though not the unit patch. The office was half full of big file folders, boxes full of… Clay wasn't sure, and assorted training materials. Taped to the walls were things that looked like personnel rosters and planning outlines. There was also a photo of some sort of tower silhouetted against a setting sun.

"Lee?" the sergeant said. "Three minutes."

Lily nodded in acknowledgement.

"Hey, you gotta newborn?" Pooch said, spotting the photo on the man's desk.

"Yeah, a little girl," Warszawski said, with a mix of pride and exhaustion typical to new parents. "Three weeks old. You?"

"A son. Eight months now," Pooch said.

Clay watched as Lily picked up a box marked 'Intro material' and added some candy from a glass jar on Warszawski's desk. The sergeant gave her a half amused, half disgruntled glare while telling Pooch about his daughter's colic.

"Where's the nightlight?"

The sergeant pointed to a shelf, and Lily reached up to pick up an opaque  white oval object about the size of an egg. It switched on as soon as she touched it, glowing a bright white, then switched off as she dropped it in the box.

"Lee, they're ready up top," Warszawski said, a hand pressed to his ear.

"All right," she said with a quirk of her lips. "Gather 'round gents, show and tell time."

They all looked around warily, because if they were going to go back up to the surface, why weren't they headed toward the elevator? What had the sergeant been calling about?

"Warszawski to the Hammond. Six people, good to go," they heard the sergeant say, and then there was a blue wash of light, and--

 

"--the actual fuck?" Pooch said.

Clay rode the adrenaline rush of life throwing him a curveball. They were in a _different room_ , about twice as big as the office, but almost completely empty. There was a circle painted on the floor around where they stood, and a strange, high sort of desk in one corner, with a guy in a coverall behind it.  There was a low frequency thrum in the air.

Pooch and Cougar had both instinctively gone for weapons they weren't carrying right now. Jensen stood completely frozen for a few seconds.

Roque - shit, Roque had followed his own instinct, which ran along the lines of 'we're being fucked over, get the person responsible.'

He'd never been the most trusting guy even before Max, and especially before Aisha. Clay still had nightmares about that, about trusting her, because _him_ she might have screwed over, but Roque she had _framed_. She'd turned Clay against his friend and XO, and turned what should have been an elegant double-cross into an unmitigated clusterfuck that had nearly gotten them all killed.

Roque still had miles of triggers under his skin, about not being in on the plan, about not being trusted, about being blindsided. Clay should have noticed sooner that the feeling of not being in on whatever Lily had planned, and having had to hand in his weapons, had triggered some of them.

Because Roque had grabbed Lily before the blue light had even faded, pulling her back against his chest and onto tip-toes with a heavy arm around her throat. She was making the painful, strained sounds of somebody trying to drag in air through a compressed windpipe. Roque looked wild-eyed, trying to find the source of the danger.

Lily's eyes were wide, but in the seconds Clay first registered what was happening she seemed to orient herself. She'd dropped the box of materials to free her hands, and one of them had come up to Roque's forearm, grabbing reflexively. It eased off now, no longer trying to pull the arm away, her hand just laying there. Her other hand was palm outward at waist level, a 'wait' signal. A quick glance told Clay it was for the tech in the corner, who looked worried and probably had a hand on an alarm button.

"Roque," Clay said, pitching his voice low and commanding. "Roque, stand down."

"We're all okay, man," Pooch said, having recovered from his own initial shock. He lifted a hand as if to touch Roque's shoulder, then thought the better of it.

"m sorry," Lily said, voice soft and strained, but just the fact she could speak at all meant Roque was easing his grip. "should have... prepared that better…"

"What the _fuck_ just happened," Roque ground out, blinking for the first time. He sounded like he was coming out of tunnel-vision.

"Roque, let her--"

"Did you actually just _beam us up_?" Jensen interrupted, half disbelieving, half delighted. He was addressing the tech in the corner.

Roque turned toward Jensen, perhaps further drawn out of his adrenal response by how Jensen didn't sound like this was an emergency situation at all, instead sounded like this was the most awesome thing ever. Roque still had a hold of Lily, but his grip was relaxing; she was on her feet now and moving with him as he turned. Clay thought she could probably get away (..then again, Roque was _fast_ ) but was waiting for him to come down enough that he'd release her.

"It's an Asgard transport beam," the tech said slowly, eyes still on Lily, hand no doubt still on the alarm button.  

"Asgard? Home of the Æsir, Valhalla, Odin Allfather, that Asgard?" Jensen asked immediately.

Clay still had most of his attention on Roque, and saw him take a deep breath, as if he'd been under water. Lily's hand lightly patted Roque's forearm, almost like tapping out in hand to hand practice. It made Roque aware that his arm was still around her throat, and he abruptly pushed her away and took a step back. He looked really, really rattled, and Clay thought it was less about the beaming thing ( _beaming_? _Really_?) and more about his own reaction. 

Lily stumbled a few paces, recovered her balance, and rounded on Roque with nothing of her usual poise. Clay saw that she was breathing flat and fast, still catching her breath. She'd pulled a pencil apparently out of nowhere, and her hand was clenched around it hard enough that its purpose was clear.

Clay tensed, saw the others tense too. This was about to go bad and to his surprise he wasn't actually sure for whom it would go worse. Roque outweighed her by at least fifty pounds and he fought _dirty_ , but a pencil was only a trivial weapon if you'd never seen the eraser end of one sticking out of somebody's eyesocket.

Clay stepped forward, not quite in between them, but preparing to. He caught Pooches eye, coordinating the intervention with a glance. Clay had absolutely no idea what to expect from Lily, if this was a defensive reflex or if she'd actually push forward. She'd once done remarkable things out of desperation, and she'd obviously had a lot of training since, but he didn't know her well enough to anticipate her.

Lily looked at Roque with blank grey eyes for a tense moment, and then blinked and let out a slow, deliberate breath. Clay could _see_ her downshifting her body language; drop her shoulders, relax her facial muscles, shift her weight off of the balls of her feet. The efficiency of it was a little eerie. He wondered if she'd always had that much control over her stress response, or if it had been instilled in her as part of the CRO training.

"Next time that happens, we better be on training mats," Lily said to Roque, voice light and dismissive. Deliberately de-escalating, though the tension around her eyes said she was still on high alert. He could still see a vein pounding at the side of her neck.

Roque nodded tersely.

Lily nodded back once, sharply, tucked the pencil away, and turned to the tech sitting behind the weird looking desk. "Thank you, Lieutenant, we're fine. Can we take the conference room with the viewport?"

"Yes ma'am." The tech still sounded dubious.

 

"We're on a spaceship called the USS George Hammond," Lily said as she lead them out of the… arrival bay? and into a hallway. "You were just, yes, _beamed_ aboard, by way of alien technology. I thought a little demonstration would help us skip the disbelief stage of this introduction talk, though obviously I could have lead it in better."

They took in the corridor, even Jensen quiet. Clay had to admit that as ridiculous as it sounded, it did have a ship-like air to it. And that low level vibration felt like an engine.

"Ah, let's settle here."

The door slid open like in a sci-fi movie, and it looked like a normal conference room; 10 chairs around a large oval table. Lily halted just inside the door and fiddled with a control panel. Then a large panel started sliding on the outer wall, and revealed a window.

"Madre de Dios," Cougar said into the ringing silence.

Earth. They were looking at Earth.

It was one thing to half accept that maybe you were on a spaceship. Looking down onto Earth, realising that everything that had ever fought for - and with - was down there and they were _up here_ …

"I knew it!" Jensen whispered. "Portal missions. _Awesome_."

After a few minutes of staring, Clay turned away from the viewport. The oval centre of the table had lit up, and above it was a projection of some kind of decoder ring. It was spinning slowly.

"Holographic tech?" Jensen's eyes were huge.

When they'd all turned away from the window, Lily gestured for them to take seats.

"So, yes, we have spaceships," she began, staying on the other side of the table. Clay thought she was probably still working through the adrenaline comedown; her hands were shaking a little. "And transport beams. I didn't strictly need to bring you up here as part of the briefing, but we find that it helps to show you some concrete proof of what we can do before we start throwing weird shit at you."

"What do you mean you didn't need to bring us up here? Isn't this how we'd be doing missions?" Pooch asked.

"Um, no."

Jensen's face fell.

"This is just so you guys won't think that I'm performing some sort of psychological experiment on you," Lily quirked a wry smile. "Watch this."

She reached toward the table to slide a small oval stone a few centimetres to the right, and a pleasant male voice began to speak.

_This is the Earth stargate. It was discovered in Giza in 1928…_

 

"Jensen, man, I owe you a beer. This is the first time ever that your crazy ideas weren't crazy _enough_ ," Clay said as the video.. not-video, projection? wound down. It had been a 30-minute visual presentation about a device that let people travel to other worlds, and the program that had grown out of its use. And aliens. ALIENS! Jesus, Clay's thoughts were chasing themselves around his head.

This _couldn't be true_ , but they had been _beamed aboard a spaceship_ which apparently had sufficient cloaking technology that no satellite could see it… And if that hadn't convinced him, the stunned glee on Jensen's face when he examined the holographic projector built in the table would have. That was clearly not tech originating from Earth.

The presentation had only briefly introduced Atlantis as a base in another galaxy, but at least they know what it was now. A mission, and a place.

Lily seemed to mostly have worked out the shakes of her post-adrenaline comedown. The sugar from candy she'd taken from Gunny Warszawski had probably helped. She'd tossed a few on the table for the Losers, but eaten most of the rest herself.

Jensen was staring silently at the gently spinning projection of the Stargate. Clay could only imagine what sort of thoughts were racing through his mind.

"Well, I would say this is all batshit crazy," Pooch said, "but the whole alien thing actually explains Cougar here pretty well."

Cougar flashed a toothy grin, but he was still staring at the hologram, too.

"I wonder - the Goa'uld--" he said the unfamiliar word carefully. "Was Max one?"

Lily tilted her head.

"Huh. I hadn't thought of that, but now that you mention it, he does seem to fit the behavioural pattern. I will make a note and drop this with the analysts at the Mountain, see what they say. They'll probably want to talk to you guys sometime to find out if you ever saw any specific signs. Glowing eyes, that sort of thing."

"Don't think so," Clay said. He turned to Roque. "You?"

"What? No."

Roque had watched the presentation in grim silence. Clay thought it was probably more about what had happened before than about the presentation. It hadn't escaped his notice that Lily had avoided turning her back on Roque. She was being subtle enough about it that he didn't think it was a deliberate signal; just something she wasn't comfortable with right now.

Roque was used to intimidating people; did it on purpose sometimes. His reputation on base as a man who was always up for a barfight hadn't been for nothing. But once in a parking garage Clay had seen him wait with getting out of his car until a woman had gotten into her own car, because it was poorly lit and isolated, and he didn't want to alarm her. Clay rather suspected Roque actually liked Lily and felt protective of her, and was currently cursing himself for losing control and doing something to inspire her wariness.

Of course, given what he'd just watched about the Stargate program and the women that worked there, the protectiveness itself might become an issue, but well, one thing at a time.

 

The next video was about the Gate network and the Ancients, and the intro of a floating city called Atlantis.

"So these Ancients left their cool toys littered all around this galaxy _and_ that other one and then just upped and left?" Jensen summarised.

"Pretty much, but they didn't really _leave_ as such," Lily said, going to the box of materials she'd brought along. "They integrated with the people on Earth, to the point where some people still have the marker in their blood that lets them use Ancient technology."

"You mean like fly the cool little spaceships, right?" Jensen said eagerly.

"The General O'Neill the video talked about, he's one of them?" Pooch said.

Lily took the 'nightlight' out of the box, and it lit up brightly.

"Yeah." The light blinked a few times. "So am I. It's not super rare, though we only have about three people who have a very strong impression of the gene. We have a gene therapy that can partially induce the marker, in some people."

Clay gave the 'nightlight' an incredulous look, feeling like his disbelief had reached maximum suspension. Turning things on with your brain. Okay. Whatever.

"We still have lots of Ancient devices where we're not actually sure what they do, and there's a whole department dedicated to figuring it out. But this actually _is_ a nightlight, and it's the easiest way to find out if people have the Ancient gene."

She made a motion as if to throw it to Jensen, then stopped herself and walked over to hand it to him.

Clay wasn't sure it boded well that she seemed to feel the need to be careful not to startle them. Their psych evals would definitely be getting a closer look, especially Roque's. The team had been cleared by the Army shrinks not long after they'd been restored in their positions. Clay thought that had more to do with all of them knowing the right things to say by now, than actually being completely okay with what had happened.

There was a marked difference between 'these are appropriate and proportional reactions to what happened' and 'You are sane and stable enough to fully function' and right now he wasn't entirely sure where any of them fell on that spectrum. Especially when faced with such abundant weirdness.

"On. On. Ooonnnn," Jensen said to the bulb. "Come on thing, turn on. Promise I'll be good to you. It will be so cool."

He tried for a few more minutes, face screwed up in concentration. Lily watched him with amusement.

"Poor Jensen. It's almost like that thing is a woman," Pooch grinned. "I take it that if he had the gene thing it would already have turned on?"

"Yeah, sorry," Lily said to Jensen. He reluctantly handed it back, and it lit up as soon as it touched her hand.

"That is _so_ unfair."

Cougar just shrugged when the thing didn't do anything, as did Pooch.

Clay felt a glimmer of disappointment when the thing stayed cold and dark in his hands. Maybe he was still looking for a sign that this was the right decision, that going to Atlantis was the right choice.

Lily walked behind Clay's chair to get to Roque, so she had space around herself to move. Clay wasn't sure she was even aware that she'd done it, but the Losers definitely noticed.

The little item dimmed when she dropped it into Roque's cupped hands, and then immediately flared up again as it landed. Not as bright as it had been in her hands, but it was definitely shining.

Roque blinked down at it.

"Huh."

"Awww _man_ ," Jensen said. "I am the one who talks to machines. Roque is like a caveman with a clay tablet compared to me."

Roque shot Jensen a look that translated to 'watch your step,' but Jensen wasn't wrong that compared to his understanding of computers, most average computer users seemed like technophobes. It wasn't that the rest of them were specifically bad or aversive to technology, just that they were content with writing reports in Word and browsing the web and playing the occasional game.  

"Can you switch it off?" Lily asked Roque, ignoring the byplay. "Think 'off' at it."

Nothing happened.

"Or sometimes it helps to picture a light switch and press it?"

The nightlight dimmed, and she looked pleased.

"Nice! Well, your team will have its own pilot, that's handy. Not ideal that it's your medic, so they'll want to try the gene therapy with the rest of you, but it's a good start."

"What if we didn't have anybody with the gene?" Clay asked.

"It wouldn't matter so much at first, because you'll be doing paired missions for the first few months anyway--teamed up with an experienced Gate team."

Clay wasn't feeling so offended by that anymore now he knew a little bit about what they'd be facing. Aliens, for fuck's sake.

"..but later on it would limit how your team could be used. You'd either have to be given a pilot, or you wouldn't be able to do much in the way of individual missions."

Roque frowned down at the little light, concentrating hard, and switched it on and off another few times. Then he offered it back to Lily with an outstretched hand, so she could take it without coming too close.

Clay saw her notice that, and he thought he saw the realisation that it was deliberate.

 

The next presentation was about the Atlantis expedition and the city/base and its missions.  

And its main enemies.

"Holy shit. Are these things for real?"

"Sadly, yeah," she said, sounding serious. "They're the main reason we don't let people learn on the job, because your first encounter is your last unless you've been well prepared. People just freeze. You guys will get to do some time in the virtual reality trainer get a sense of what to expect from them."

"That's some fucked up shit," Pooch summarised, as the final image of the presentation - a snarling Wraith - rotated slowly above the table.

"Did you ever encounter one up close?" Clay asked.

"Once," she nodded. "And I was fucking lucky he was more concerned about getting away that about feeding. Once they're within arms length there isn't much you can do that won't piss them off more than it will help your situation."

Clay must have looked sceptical.  

She reached for the holographic controls.

"I'm going to make him life size, okay?"

Even with that warning, all five of them jumped to their feet as the holographic Wraith grew and grew until it was towering over all of them.

Lily stepped up onto a chair and then onto the table, combat boots and all, and stood next to it. Clay grimaced. She wasn't a small woman, and it towered over her, long-limbed and menacing.

"Yeah," she nodded at his expression. "I'm just saying. We make space vampire jokes, but when you run into them, there's nothing funny about it."

She jumped down off the table and shrunk the hologram down to previous size.

"I was irrigating somebody's wound at the time, so I had a 7-gauge hypo needle in my hand."

Roque grimaced, and Clay shot him a questioning look.

"That's pretty much the biggest needle there is, bro," Roque explained. "It's like, icepick sized."

"I mostly have it in my trauma kit for threatening Marines who are whining for attention," she admitted. Then, contemplatively, "But it comes in handy for other things sometimes."

Roque huffed a laugh. Clay wondered if dealing with the friendly-attention starved mental states of stressed soldiers was part of a field medics' semi-official duties in every branch of the military. If it were she probably got a lot more of it than Roque, with his infamous bedside manner, ever invited.

"Anyway, I managed to stick it into the Wraith's hand, and I think it went all the way through, but he didn't even seem to feel it. He'd just fed on somebody, and nothing can really touch them then. I 'only' got thrown into a wall, and thankfully he left it at that because he was in a hurry."

"Only?" Clay asked.

"It was about eight metres away. Thankfully Colbert was standing in front of it, or I would have broken my neck. We came away with a concussion each."

She saw his expression, and there was a wry twist to her voice.

"Yeah. _Good_ times."

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love feedback any which way, but if there are any readers coming at this story from The Losers fandom, I'd be especially interested in hearing how this story is working for you :-)


	5. Chapter 5

Lily gave them some files to read about the Goa'uld and how their influence had shaped life in the Milky Way, and left to see if they could have a tour of the bridge.

The moment she left the room, Jensen jumped up to get the nightlight from the box.

"You are not going to leave that alone, are you?" Clay asked.

"Hell no. Captain Luddite over there gets to talk to cool alien tech and I don't? _Hell_ no," Jensen said, folding his hands around the thing and staring at it intently.

The door to the corridor had stayed open - Clay wondered if it was on purpose, to make sure they didn't feel trapped - and he and Roque could see passing crewmembers glancing inside.

The mood on the spaceship seemed relaxed, with calm speaking tones and nobody moving above a purposeful walking pace. Perhaps it was because it was in orbit right now, concerned only with loading supplies for the next voyage, exchanging crew and whatever 'remote monitoring' pertained to, and it would be different when it was away from Earth.  He still got the impression that this was a good place, a 'happy ship'.

 

"Hello Lee," they heard somebody in the corridor. "Did Cam--Colonel Mitchell -- manage to take you for that ride?"

"Colonel Carter!" it was apparently Lily who was being addressed, and she sounded surprised but pleased. "Yes he did, ma'am, yesterday. Thank you very much for arranging it."

"You're welcome. I did owe you, and Mitchell doesn't get to fly so often that he'll turn down the opportunity, so that worked out well. Did you enjoy it?"

"Any reports about undignified sounds I may or may not have made are lies and slander, ma'am," Lily said blandly. Then, her grin audible, "It was very -- I loved it."

"You're going back tomorrow, aren't you? How is the city?" Carter sounded maybe a little bit wistful.

Clay finally clicked together this was the Carter who had been in command of Atlantis until recently, which must be how she knew Lily. The two women seemed familiar, though not so close that the gulf in rank had disappeared.

"Ticking along. The latest fad is juggling. I wouldn't be sorry to miss that if I were you, ma'am."

"Ball jokes?"

"Ball jokes," Lily confirmed. "Ball jokes _everywhere_."

Cougar, also listening, snorted a laugh.

"Do you miss it?" Lily asked softly.

"Sometimes. The scent of salt on the air, and that hour before sunset when everything looks like it's made of glass and lace and light."

"I can imagine."

"I miss the city sometimes, but having her--" an arm came into Clay's view, patting the bulkhead with something like affection, "makes up for a lot."

"She is much nicer now I'm not out of my mind with worry and wound fever," Lily agreed. "Thank you for letting me use space here as exposition room."

"You're welcome. I know these things go easier if you can jump ahead past the disbelief. Have you done a bridge tour?"

"I just went to ask, but the LT on duty wasn't too thrilled about the idea."

Clay wondered if that was because the footage of the Loser's arrival on the ship would no doubt have been seen on the bridge, and the duty officer didn't want to take the risk of having them up there.

"Ah," Carter said knowingly. "I'm letting my new junior officer take bridge shifts while we're in orbit. It's only Stevenson's second solo shift. I'll get my Second to come up to give you guys a tour."

"Thank you very much, ma'am."

 

Lily looked a little flushed when she came back inside, as if running into the colonel had flustered her.

She noticed Jensen was still locked in a battle of wills with the nightlight, and tossed a piece of candy into his lap to get his attention.

"Hey," she said sharply when he looked up. "Stop trying to give yourself an aneurysm. Some of our best engineers don't have the gene; they just get somebody else to activate stuff. I promise it won't even slow you down."

Jensen didn't look convinced, but he did give up on the nightlight and put it on the table.

 

A few minutes later a Captain Yee picked them up for a bridge tour. Jensen and Pooch bombarded him with questions as they walked the corridors toward the bridge, and Cougar was following the conversation with interest.

"Have you been on here before?" Clay asked Lily, who was walking next to him. Roque was on his other side.

"I'm more familiar with one of the others, the Daedalus. I was on here only the once - the Hammond helped us out with a big rescue mission a couple of months ago," she said. "Waronir - you'll probably hear that name mentioned during your training."

"What happened?"

She blew out a breath. "It's…" she made a small, frustrated gesture and then sighed. "You know what, I have no idea how to tell you in less than fifteen minutes. They've finally rounded off the full investigation, so you'll probably get the mission report during you training as a prime example of just how FUBAR things can get on offworld missions."

"Not just offworld," Roque remarked, saying 'offworld' with the same ironic twist Clay felt about it. This was all so bizarre.

"I know that," she said softly. "Hell, you know that I know that."

Roque nodded in acknowledgement. Given how they'd first met her, yes. There was no denying that.

"There's just a special kind of FUBAR when you can't even imagine half the variables yet. It's like a roleplaying game with a particularly volatile games master and with randomly changing rules nobody will tell you."

 

The bridge was large and spacious and full of futuristic looking desk areas, most of which were unmanned at the moment. Captain Yee led them to a space close to the largest viewport. It was mostly blocked off by the back of monitor desks, and there was a handwritten sign that said 'gawker's area'. Yee talked them through what the ship was and could do, and what the different areas on the bridge controlled.

There was a small panel of switches just outside the area, but within arm's reach. Clay saw Jensen peer at it, his hands deliberately stuffed in his pockets. Clay suspected it was as much to restrain himself from touching anything as it was to show the others he wasn't about to. Jensen might have some impulse control issues, but he was also smart enough not to give in to them in a situation like this.

"What are they for?" Clay asked Yee when the man paused.

The Captain smiled minutely.  
"Little joke from the engineers. It sets off a flashlight and an alarm to draw attention to the fact that a visitor is touching things they're not supposed to."

"It's a trap!" Jensen cackled, hands still demonstratively in his pockets.

 

When the bridge tour was concluded the group returned to the arrival bay. The Lieutenant at the control desk tensed a little, watching them warily.

Clay had noticed Roque making an effort to stay out of Lily's space, but in her field of vision. He wondered if she'd noticed the consideration, and if she had, if she'd ever know that made her part of a very select group of people Roque was willing to offer an apology to, even if it was such a tacit one. Normally he would just let it go, especially given that she wasn't going to be someone they'd have much contact with in the near future.

"Back to the Atlantis office please, Lieutenant," Lily said.

"Aye ma'am. I'll set you down in the corridor just outside the office."

Lily nodded and stepped into the circle, taking the same position she'd had on the way up, shoulder to shoulder with both Clay and Roque.

Clay saw Roque blink, clearly surprised by the voluntary proximity, and wondered if this was her form of 'apology accepted.'

The tech counted down, there was the wash of bright blue light again, and then they were standing outside the Atlantis Office.

 

"Well, that was all very exciting," Pooch declared, while Jensen started into a monologue about how they needed to introduce a specific gesture or stance while the whole beaming thing was happening, just to give it that iconic look.

Warzawski was in the office together with Lily's Staff Sergeant - Colbert, from his uniform - and a Hispanic NCO with a shaved head.

"Espera," Lily greeted them. "Brad."

"Kimne," Colbert replied with a slight incline of his head, in a tone Clay would have expected to say 'ma'am'. Lily's lips quirked slightly.

Behind Colbert, Warszawski made a complicated face and turned away to rummage uselessly in a desk drawer. Clay wondered about that. She was obviously familiar with Warszawski to be on first name basis, but there was a kind of sharpness there. With Colbert she was more formal - or rather, he was with her - but that was underlain with a mutual hint of warmth, as if they were sharing an inside joke.   

"It go okay?" she asked.

"Full marks, ma'am" Colbert said, indicating the diving qualification certificate on the desk.

"Nice."

 

Lily introduced them all. Colbert was her team sergeant, Espera had been in First Recon with Colbert and was now part of an Atlantis gate team - when he was stationed there. He was currently doing a five month rotation at the Mountain.

"How is that working out for you?" Pooch asked as the Losers, Lily Brittner and the two sergeants headed for the commissary for a late lunch.

"I'm one of the first to try out the new system, so they haven't really hammered out our positions here at the SGC. I'm not on a Gate team here, so the work isn't nearly as interesting as it is on Atlantis. Mostly I'm pulling Gate Room duty at the moment. But!" Espera perked up, "I actually get to see my wife and little girl every day, so there's that."

"They live around here?"

"They're in base housing right now, but we still have a house in Oceanside. If this rota system works out well we'll look into selling up and moving up here."

"That's what my wife and I have been talking about. My son is eight months old. Being away five months a year-"

"You can do two times two and a half, you can stick a week of leave in the middle," Espera interruped.

"Right, exactly. That's a hell of a lot more daddy time than only the two months leave. Jo's got her family nearby now though, so I'm not too eager to uproot her."

Clay was pleased to note that Pooch clearly wasn't the only one trying to combine the Atlantis mission with a family, and that there might even be families in a similar position for Jolene to connect with.

Lily and Colbert were walking together, not speaking. Clay would have been hard pressed to find anything but professionalism, but there was still something fond about that word Colbert had greeted her with - it hadn't sounded like English.. what did it mean? - and the way they fell into step, shoulders slanted toward each other just slightly.

 

When they were in the elevator Jensen was expounding on the merits of a sober hand-over-the-heart position versus a Travolta-in-Saturday-Night-Fever pose.

Colbert was following the whole thing with amusement around his eyes.

There was a momentary lull as Jensen concluded his argument for the Saturday Night Fever pose. Then Cougar suggested the Macarena. Because Cougar not-so-secretly enjoyed Jensen's chatter, and also Cougar was an _asshole_.

Clay exchanged a "Why us?" glance with Roque.

"Ma'am," Colbert addressed Lily in an undertone, "Are you sure allowing him and Sergeant Person in the same galaxy is advisable?"

"Why, they'll get on like a house on fire," Lily said, widening her eyes just slightly, and for a second there was something rural and Northwestern in her accent that wasn't normally audible.

"Exactly, ma'am." Colbert said.

 

Espera and Pooch kept up their conversation through the food line and well into lunch; they were talking about being stationed in Atlantis when you had a family. Espera's experience of coming back to Earth after Atlantis to a wife who thought he'd been on a regular Earth mission had been rough. The existence of alien life and inter-galactic travel was OpsSec of a different kind of magnitude than anything any of them had been doing so far.

Jensen was now on the currently publicly known theories on wormholes and how declassifying the Stargate would upset the scientific apple cart in a major way. To Clay's surprise, Colbert wasn't put off by the speed-talking and the tangents. He didn't say much - Clay thought that was probably his usual manner - but he was following along and giving input here and there.

Lily was observing quietly as she ate, seeming content with listening to the rapid fire conversations around her. Clay thought she was mostly listening to Pooch and Espera, but then Colbert asked her something about the Atlantis oversight committee and she answered immediately.

She saw him look surprised, and shrugged. "I'm good at multitrack."

Jensen was eyeing up her fries. The Losers were used to this ritual; stealing food off their plates was Jensen's weird way of testing his standing. If he wanted to know how you felt about him, he'd try to sneak something from your plate. His near-constant rambling might get on their nerves sometimes and nobody was shy about letting him know when it did, but if they were willing to tolerate him stealing the odd thing from their plate or MRE then Jensen was reassured that things were really okay.

The exception was Roque, who didn't tolerate it. Way back when Clay had first met him, Roque had still eaten with an arm curled around his plate and a tight grip on his cutlery. He still didn't take kindly to Jensen's habit, but he and Jensen had their own way of relating to each other, which mostly consisted of an exchange of cheerful mocking (Jensen) and half-hearted death threats (Roque).

It was probably messed up, but it worked for them, and Clay had long ago accepted that systems that worked were the best kind of systems.

Just as Jensen started to inch his hand toward Lily's plate, Colbert's hand shot out - Jesus, the guy was _fast_ \- and pressed Jensen's hand back against the table. It wasn't loud or forceful, just a pointed, wordless interception.

"Dawg," Espera said to Jensen, attention draw by the movement, "Do you want to get stabbed? Because that's how you get stabbed."

"Aww, guys, it was only the one time," Lily said, not looking up from her food. Clay thought that maybe she was trying for funny, but fell somewhat short of the mark because while Colbert and Espera seemed to find it amusing, she was clearly uncomfortable with the subject.

"And Ray was fine after a couple of sessions with the tissue healer," Espera added blithely, not seeming to notice her discomfort.

"So when you go back to Atlantis you'll get back your position on the gate team?" Pooch asked, diverting attention with the ease of long practice.

"So how's the food on Atlantis?" Roque asked Lily, taking that 'moving on!' cue.

"Oh man, alien food. It's a whole new world," she started, apparently shaken out of her momentary gloom.

 

After lunch the Losers were sent to the infirmary for intake screenings. Espera accompanied them, apparently having taken over guide duty. It was Colbert and Lily's last day on Earth, and Colbert declared his intentions to sign out a car and buy 'a metric fuckton of crap at Walmart'.

Lily had a gym session planned with a Major DeClerck, who was apparently the only other person in the Stargate Program higher than a second Dan grade in Aikido; at least since her Atlantis training partner had left for OCS. She and Colbert agreed to meet for a last-night-on-Earth steak dinner in a nearby bar, and headed off on their respective ways.

 

"Wait, they mean actual chipping? Like a pet dog?" Jensen said, skimreading the paperwork they'd been handed in the infirmary.

"..and they can _track_ us with those chips," Roque said, voice void of any emotion.

Clay knew Lily had seen their files, but Espera hadn't. The man was astute though, and had clearly picked up on the level of mistrust the Losers had toward command. Any command. Clay hoped they could get these reflexes under control soon, or it was going to become a problem in this new position.

"What that means in practice is that they can find you when you've gotten lost, stolen or bewildered on an alien planet, and pull your ass outta the fire."

"Right," Roque said dubiously.

"They're not mandatory except for Gate teams," Jensen read out loud.

"It's not strictly necessary to handle the chips right now," Dr Lam told them when Clay asked if this needed to happen today. It was clear the guys - and he himself, if he were honest - needed some time to get used to the idea. "We'll revisit it halfway into your training."

It was rapidly becoming clear that they could expect very regular medical checks, and also that the medical personnel here was adept at handling people who were more likely to hide problems than complain about them.

"Thank you."

She nodded, and launched into an explanation of the ATA gene therapy. When she was done, Pooch said, slow and careful, "But I can opt out, right?"

"Of course."

The way Dr Lam told it the risks were small, but they did exist. No matter how convenient it would be for Pooch to be able to continue being their designated driver, Clay understood why he didn't want to risk it. Taking risks in the course of their missions was one thing. Undergoing gene therapy that was more experimental than not, and could have unknown repercussions for the rest of his life… And not only that, but which he couldn't discuss with Jolene - yeah.

Pooch glanced at Clay with a mix of question and apology, and Clay nodded.

"I think all our roles will get a bit of shuffling anyway," he said, shrugging. From what he'd seen so far, there'd be a hell of a lot more negotiation, which was a role that might suit Pooch very well.

Dr Lam checked her tablet. She clearly had both their medical records and the notes Lily had made earlier, because she said, "Since Captain Roque here has the gene naturally, it isn't strictly necessary for any of you to have the therapy."

Which was true, but Lily hadn't been wrong about the inconvenience of only having one pilot, especially if that pilot was also the medic. Two skills that weren't transferrable. Sometimes you just needed to load up your casualties and get the hell out.

"I want it," Jensen said, signing the consent form with his spiky script.

"I'll do it too," Clay decided, because being able to fly one of the little spaceships would be handy, but also because he couldn't very well expect the men to trust in this new command if he refused.

"Si, me also," Cougar said.

Pooch looked relieved.

 

What followed was the world's most thorough medical examination Clay had ever had; apparently they needed a baseline established before they were exposed to any of the 'alien shit'. It included a full MRI, blood workup, brain scan, and photos and notes about any scars and tattoos, especially around his neck and spine.

"Have you been told how Goa'uld larvae enter a human body?" Doctor Womack responded when he asked about that. "We have better methods of detecting them now, but if those aren't available, it helps to have this to compare to when looking for entry scars." 

The doctor had him raise his chin and made a photo of his throat. Clay almost laughed when he saw a glimpse of it. It was still strange to be clean-shaven for once. Roque and Jensen had opted to stick with the facial hair for now, and since they actually groomed it, it could pass for acceptable until told otherwise. Atlantis did kind of sound like the kind of place where the 'tactical beard' might not be uncommon even amongst Marines. But Clay's usual scruff would have looked too much like a 'fuck you' in the face of a new command, so he'd shaven to show willing.

He was a Colonel, but he'd been working with small independently operating teams since he'd made Captain; BlackOps wasn't generally a great career path if you were looking for command positions, even if you did get promoted. Clay had never actually had a larger command, and never wanted one. So while getting based in Atlantis under a less senior Colonel was a strange situation, it didn't bother him that there would be no place for him in the chain of command of the base.

He'd be taking orders from Colonel Sheppard and Major Lorne - both were, if the way Lily spoke about them was anything to go by, forces to be reckoned with - and that was fine by him. He was willing to accept a de-facto demotion if it meant he got to keep his team, got to have a purpose, could do missions with clear parameters for superiors he could - maybe - trust.

"This was a knife wound?" Womack indicated the scar inflicted by one of Roque's knives.

Clay thought about the wounds he'd given Roque on that same day, and was glad these examinations were done in separate rooms, not just cloth partitions. They'd all seen each other's scars - metaphorical and physical - but these physical reminders of the explosive disaster he'd let Aisha manipulate him into were a little more sensitive than needed to be shared.  

 

After an hour and a half of poking, prodding and scanning, he asked,

"Is it always this thorough after a mission?"

"Oh, Gods no," Womack said absently, typing something in his file. Then, looking up, "Ours here at the Mountain are usually ten minutes or so unless there's an injury or there are other concerns. I believe on Atlantis they have a system based on how high risk the planet is classed, though it'll still be thorough for your first few missions. As soon as they trust you to self-report, this all becomes a lot simpler."

"Right." Yeah, self reporting. That was going to have to be a work in progress.

 

He returned to the small waiting room to find Jensen, Pooch and Cougar playing blind man's bluff with Espera. They were betting with M&Ms and Skittles.

"Roque?" he inquired.

"They're picking his brain about his medical training, sir," Pooch said.

Then Dr Lam approached with a tray with syringes, and Clay, Jensen and Cougar got the jab that would maybe - hopefully - enable them to talk to alien technology with their brain.

After an hour of card games, and Roque reappearing with a slightly dazed expression from the medical skills they wanted to cram into his brain - Dr Lam brought in a 'nightlight'. Jensen perked up.

"Come on, baby," he crooned at it, cupping it carefully in his hands, "talk to me."

Nothing seemed to be happening. Dr Lam dimmed the lights in the waiting room. Clay thought he saw the slightest glow for the space of a second, before the little orb dimmed again. Jensen made a frustrated sound.

"That's a no?" Pooch asked.

"Hard to say yet," the doctor said. "For people who have the gene naturally, a lot of the technology reaches out - they actually have to train on how to stop technology from activating when they come near, because you don't always want that. The induced gene is a lot less instinctive to work with."

"The guys with the natural gene say it can be like an over-enthusiastic dog that wants attention," Espera said. "For me it's more like a very shy or antisocial dog I have to convince to interact with me. Especially the first few times."

"I think it glowed," Jensen said stubbornly. "A little."

"It may have. We'll check again tomorrow," Dr Lam promised, holding out her hand. Jensen reluctantly handed the orb over.

Clay tried, he really did, but he felt like he might as well have thought 'on' at a boiled egg. There wasn't the faintest glow, and there was nothing like a mental 'click' like Espera described.

He shrugged, and passed it on to Cougar. The man closed his eyes, and his lips moved in what Clay thought was 'encender,' a silent command, or maybe a plea.

"Yes!" Jensen almost jumped out of his chair when the orb lit up slightly. It wasn't very strong even in the dimmed light of the room, but it was definitely on. "Oh man, Cougs, I can't decide if I'm more excited for you or pissed off with you."

Cougar grinned down at the thing, looking a little dazed.

"I'll call that a strength of about a two," Dr Lam said, and made a note on her tablet. "There's a good chance it'll be a little stronger tomorrow-" Jensen punched the air "So I want you back in here tomorrow afternoon when your schedule permits."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, this is what inspired the [Lingua Pegasa](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1159890), the use of 'Kimne' as title. The background to what's happening in the office at that moment, which Clay can't possibly know, is that Warszawski was once on that Kimseh basis with Lee, but isn't any more - they are friendly again, but no longer close. She's forgiven him for leaving, but not for how he left.
> 
> I think that moment is where he realises that for a long time they both thought that she would be part of the lives of any children he might have; that they would also be hers to care for and about. Back then she would already have been there to babysit so he could get some sleep. Now he has a newborn daughter and Lee hasn't met her and isn't likely to. He chose for things to be this way, but maybe it's the moment where the loss of that aspect of the connection really sinks in; that his actions didn't just end that relationship for his own sake, but also for his daughter, and that she will never know Lee as more than an acquaintance, if at all.
> 
> I think Brad used the word deliberately; partly because of some lingering resentment with his predecessor for abandoning his team and leaving it behind hurt and broken, and partly because it's more respectful and formal than her first name (Which he normally uses on Atlantis, but at the SGC and in front of new recruits he'd want to show, or rather demonstrate, respect) but more personal than 'ma'am'.
> 
> (Welcome to Rock Happy, where there's more happening behind the scenes than you can possibly shake a stick at!)


	6. Chapter 6

After a brief radio check-in with Warszawski, Espera took them up to the security room at the surface where they'd left behind their duffels, then to quarters set aside for Atlantis personnel in training. There were three standard barracks-style rooms, a shared bathroom and one 'team room' with a large table, chairs and a tiny kitchenette. 

There was a framed poster on the wall in the team room. 

_"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight_ _efficiently and die gallantly._ **Specialization is for insects** _."_

_\-- Robert A. Heinlein_

"That's kind of the expedition motto," Espera explained. "They are big fans of cross-training. Makes more sense when you think about the first year, when they were isolated. Things ain't so desperate these days, but the attitude sticks."

Clay nodded. He was only just beginning to wrap his head around the idea that that had actually happened. That a hundred and twenty people had stepped through a wormhole into the unknown, on what was, for all intents and purposes, likely to be a one-way journey.

Jensen and Pooch claimed one room (Jensen talked even in his sleep and Pooch slept like the dead), twitchy sleepers Roque and Cougar shared the other, and Clay claimed the single one as was expected. 

 

The next step was Atlantis gear - dark grey BDUs, new boots, PT gear - it all felt a little like the start of boot camp. Then a laptop, because Atlantis didn't use much paper and they'd need one. 

When the instruction lecture for internet security was finally over, it was 1810 hours. Espera was just saying goodbye to them, about to head home to his wife and kid, when he received a text message. He checked it and grinned wide. 

"Colbert says to talk Captain Brittner into taking you along to the Snake's Head tonight for dinner and drinks," he grinned. "You guys can't leave the base without an escort right now," presumably to make sure they wouldn't get falling-down drunk and blab new secrets to everybody who would listen, "and you'll be too busy from tomorrow on."

"You think she'd take us?" Pooch asked. Apparently Clay wasn't the only one who'd noticed she'd seemed relieved to be able to hand them over to Espera for the afternoon.

"She was going anyway, just needs to sign out a bigger car. And Colbert knows what he's doing," Espera shrugged. 

"Sure. How do we find her?"

"It's the first chance to do proper Aikido she's had in six months or so. She's probably still in the gym."

 

She was, though the active part of the afternoon was obviously at an end; it was just her, a woman with greying brown hair in a braid, and a huge black guy with a… what the hell was that on his forehead? They were sitting on the mat talking, the women wearing gi and those wrap around trousers--hakama-- and the guy in workout clothes. 

Lily rose gracefully to her feet and met them halfway into the gym room.

"Hello ma'am," Espera said. "Good afternoon?"

"It was," she nodded, glancing at the Losers, who'd come in with him.

"Colbert asked me to remind you that steak made from actual earth cows is awaiting you," Espera grinned. He held up his phone with the time visible, and she seemed surprised. "And also to ask you if you wanted to take our new friends," he nodded his head to the team, "along for their last non-commissary meal in a while."

She gave the man a very dry look, because the Losers were standing _right there_ and she would have to be spectacularly blunt to refuse. She looked like she knew it, like she knew Espera knew it, and that she was aware the Sergeant was completely unrepentant.

She rubbed a tired hand through her sweat-damp hair, making it stand up in spikes, and Clay, not usually the most sensitive to other people's discomfort, found himself saying, "We can just eat in the commissary, you don't have to-"

She waved a hand. "Nah, it's fine. Give me twenty minutes to get ready. And you," she narrowed her eyes at Espera, "can make sure they've got a van ready when we get up to the surface." 

"On it, ma'am." Espera threw her a loose salute, winked at the Losers as he turned around, and headed out. 

"if you sign me out a crappy mini-van, Poke, so help me God!" Lily called after him. 

Espera turned around to walk backward a few steps, making an innocent face and an open handed "What?!" gesture. 

"My revenge will be slow and sneaky," she said, pointing a finger at him with a sharp sort of grin.

"Lookin' forward to it, ma'am!" he called before he disappeared. 

 

They headed to quarters to change into civvies, and just short of twenty minutes later Lily swung by. She'd showered and changed into jeans and a hoodie with what looked like a typical college print, but made Clay do a double take because it actually said 'I like to party' and in smaller print 'And by party I mean take naps'. She was also wearing those sheepskin boots that looked like house slippers and mostly seemed to be worn by college girls. 

It turned out that the Snake's Head was a bar run by ex-SGC personnel, and together with its convenient location, that made it the place where half the Mountain came to wind down after hours. There were more than a few military ID stickers in windows when Pooch parked up the 9-person van they'd been given. 

It was a nice enough place, with a decent menu and staff Clay suspected were a mix of ex military and family of SGC personnel. The food service area had booths with partitions that ran all the way to the ceiling, which provided a good deal more privacy than was usual, and probably not by accident. 

Colbert was waiting for them in one of the large booths, drinking a beer and playing on a Nintendo DS in a battered hardcase. 

"Kimsuhr. You get us some new games?" Lily greeted him, scooting in next to him. 

Colbert said nothing, just grinned and produced a small stack of cases.

"Cool," she drew the word out as she flipped through the games. 

"I also got you this," Colbert said, taking a t-shirt from a bag next to him. It looked like one of the grey standard issue Atlantis t-shirts, the same as they'd all received that afternoon. Colbert unfolded it and in place of the screemprinted name it had a single line of text in the same font and colour as the standard issue t-shirts. Lily covered her mouth with a hand to contain her mirth.

" _This is not my first goat rodeo_ ," Jensen read out loud, for Pooch and Roque, who were craning their necks to see.

Roque huffed a laugh.

"Poke suggested getting a helmet cover printed up too, but I thought we'd start with a t-shirt,"Colbert said, looking pleased by her reaction. 

"Beats a forehead tattoo,"she said, looking down on the t-shirt with a small grin, then tucking it away in her shoulder bag.

"You need to say that a lot?"Clay said, and got a very dry look not from Lily, who just smiled a little, but from Colbert. 

Yeah, okay. She was female and a junior Captain and in the weird position of CRO, who sometimes needed to take command of a situation even though there were far more senior officers involved. And she was young – which was far more noticeable when she was relaxed and out of uniform, and he thought that probably wasn't a coincidence. She seemed smaller like this, softer, like she been wearing a different version of herself along with the uniform. He thought she probably really _could_ blend with the college crowd like this. 

"It isn't often a problem in the city," Lily said. 

Espera had let the Losers in on the commonly accepted language for referring to classified things. Atlantis was 'the city,' versus 'the Mountain' which was the SGC. 'Over here' was not just Earth but the entire Milkyway galaxy, 'dirtside' was Earth, and 'over there' referred to the Pegasus galaxy. Planets became countries, societies 'folks'. Goa'uld were 'snakes' (that explained the name of the bar) and Wraith were 'suckers,' which had made them all snort when they'd first heard it. 

"People at the Mountain don't really know me very well," she continued. Opened her mouth to say something else, then visibly changed her mind. "Hey, how did the therapy thing turn out?"

 

Clay half listened to the conversation – Jensen was explaining that there had definitely, definitely been signs of it working on him - but mostly observed the place. It was full of people with military bearing, and a lot of them obviously knew each other and the staff. 

There seemed to be a back room, if the trickle of people disappearing through a door there was any indication. Clay wondered what that was about. 

 

The food was basic but good, the meal livened by Jensen's chatter and Colbert swapping stories with Pooch and Roque about Afghanistan.

 

Clay found himself a little bit mesmerised by the truly enormous steak Lily was putting away. She'd gone to say hi to somebody shortly after ordering it and there had been immediate betting about if she would be able to finish it.

(Pooch, Jensen and Cougar: no. Roque and Colbert: yes. Clay had kept out of it, though he'd kind of regretted it after Colbert had explained that the Pegasus equivalent to steak was only allowed to be served cooked all the way through. If this was a twice a meal year...)

Even Roque had slowed down two-thirds into his own version, but she was still working away at it steadily. Jesus the woman could _eat_. He wasn't the only one surreptitiously watching, judging by Jensen's thoughtful "I'm... in awe. And also aroused."

Next to Jensen, Pooch's hand already started to move to slap him on the back of the head, because they could _see_ the 'big piece of meat' joke coming. There were women who would have rolled with that kind of joke – hell, Aisha would probably have made it herself – but Lily definitely wasn't one of them. 

She gave Jensen a flat look, and he hastily continued, "by that steak! That thing looks _delicious_."

  
When she finally put down her cutlery and leant back, Pooch, Cougar and Jensen grudgingly handed over money. 

Clay remembered that betting for money was both forbidden and pointless in Atlantis (there wasn't anything to spend it on) and that the poker pot usually contained things like chore IOUs, pairs of socks, coffee grounds, chocolate and shower gel. That would take some getting used to for the Losers, who were used to betting big. 

Colbert passed half of his winnings on to Lily, and after a moment, Roque did too. She'd been followed the exchanges with a bemused look, then looked from the notes in front of her to Colbert with the glimpse of a smile. 

"You bet on me?"

"Three safe bets, Kimne: for you to befriend the local domesticated animals, to win at Slapsies, and to finish your plate," he shrugged. 

"So," Jensen said brightly, "Dessert?"

Clay huffed a laugh at her expression.

"I feel like a pet snake after its weekly feeding," she said, slouching back comfortably. "I need a little sign that says 'Do not disturb, digesting.'"

 

They moved to the back room, which required showing their SGC ID cards to one of the owners. Ah. 

"It's not officially secure, but we can talk a little freer," Colbert said. Judging from the other visitors, it was mostly a place where people could let their guard down and have a drink without great concerns about OpSec. 

 

Twenty minutes and a round of shots later they were playing Slapsies. Because of course a game that consisted wholly of good natured attempts to hurt each other appealed to the Losers. There was some attempt to get Lily in on it, since she was apparently good at it, but she held up her hands and languidly declared that she had no intention of moving more than strictly necessary for the next 24 hours or so. 

Colbert had great reflexes, and the Losers knew each other well enough to see every tell and every twitch, so it was a challenging game. After a couple of rounds Clay decided his knuckles were quite bruised enough and bowed out of the competition. Then it was time for another round of shots, and Pooch protested that Colbert was sticking to beer and had the advantage.

"Brad, there's space in the van," Lily offered. "You can get the car tomorrow."

"Sure?" Colbert asked, holding up the car keys with a questioning look. 

"Sure. I'm not the one who missed dirtside booze," she gestured a 'gimme,' then snatched the keys out of the air when he threw them.

He went to order a shot for himself and a glass of orange juice for her.

 

"You don't drink?" Clay asked her, joining her in the booth from where she was watching the next round start. The guys had appropriated barstools and put them in a circle to accommodate their game.

"Not offw--only at home," she shrugged, and it kind of blew his mind that he was talking to somebody who was not only stationed on a base _in another galaxy_ , but who considered it more home than Earth was. 

"You know, was a time where I would have reminded people that nobody functions well with broken fingers," she mused, placidly watching Roque rap Colbert's hand rather harder than strictly necessary. 

"And now?"

"I've spent four years living in close quarters with Marines." She made a throwaway gesture. "Unless somebody is setting their public hair on fire, it doesn't even register."

Clay snorted, amused, and they watched the guys play. They were the loudest in a space that was really more geared toward quiet post-work drinks than loud bar scenes, but they were also in good moods, and nobody really seemed bothered. 

"What does Kimne mean?" he asked finally.

She went still for half a second.  
"It's a title. Sort of a formal version of 'She Who Must Be Obeyed'."

Clay thought that might be a joke, but it was really hard to tell from the delivery.

He'd gathered that it was a title from the tone. Clay wondered if Colbert had adopted the formality to signal to others that she was due that sort of respect. It didn't seem to be their usual manner.

Lily nodded when he mentioned this. "We don't want to encourage rumours."

"There are rumours?"

"Of course there are rumours. I don't think there's a woman in the service who isn't rumoured to be sleeping with the people she works with. It just bothers Brad more than me."

"It doesn't bother you people think that?"

She half turned toward him, looking like he'd said something funny.

"Colonel, I've been in the military for fifteen years. If I still had a thin skin about this stuff, I would've snapped and stabbed somebody by now."

Clay nodded soberly. He'd never given much thought to how the casual barracks talk must feel for those constantly subject to it. Nor to how dismissive it really was of their professional abilities. 

"Of course, he _is_ my husband," Lily mused, and Clay inhaled his scotch.

She scooted over in the booth to gave him a few helpfully hard whacks on the back. 

"Well, one of them," she continued blithely when he was no longer choking. His eyes were watering, and he was hard pressed to put his glass down safely. 

The guys were watching with interest

"I'm.. you.." Clay gestured helplessly, still coughing a little, " _what?_ "

Even after all the bizarre revelations of the day, this seemed more out there than any of it. He was willing to believe wormholes through some kind of giant alien rotary phone before he'd believe any part of the military would let a married couple serve on the same recon team. 

He also just didn't get a couple vibe off of them at all. There was something much more sibling-like to the pair of them. 

"We got married on Ruklok last year. Lovely ceremony," she said blandly. 

She was actually serious. She'd played the timing up for effect, dropping the bomb just when he was taking a drink, but everything about her body language said that this wasn't a joke. 

"You realise that is weird as fuck, right?" 

"I guess my weird-shit-o-meter is calibrated a little different from the norm," she shrugged. "And what's a few polyandrous wedding vows between team?"

"She means we are married _on that specific planet_ ," Colbert said, bringing her another orange juice. He gave Lily a look somewhere halfway between amused and reproachful, and she widened her eyes at him.

 

Just then a woman came up to their booth with a delighted "Lee!" and plopped onto the benchseat next to Lily. She had long black hair with a pale streak in it, strong features that were skillfully made up, and wore a low cut top. She slung an affectionate arm around Lily's shoulders, who stiffened a little. Clay thought it was more that she wasn't used to casual touch than that she didn't like the woman, because she smiled, and her voice dropped to low and amused.

"Hi Vala."

"I hear you've been in town for a whole week and we haven't been dancing _once_!" the woman was saying, mock-affronted and flirty. "Nobody around here does your hopping thing, and I had _so_ much fun last time."

"Lindy hop," Lily corrected absently. "And I'm sorry, I haven't had time, but there's a weekend clinic in November I've got tickets for.."

The woman visibly perked up, and Clay was intrigued by the contrast between them. Vala's entire appearance and manner was designed to draw the eye and to seduce, and it wasn't until now that he realised to what degree Lily did the exact opposite. He wouldn't have expected them to like each other. While they didn't seem particularly close, they apparently did get along.

Some kind of future engagement agreed on principle – Lily had lost her dance partner and apparently Vala was happy to step in – Vala then turned her attention to Clay.

"Oh _hello_. And who is this?"

The full force of her flirtatious attention was a little bit intimidating. Clay was used to being the more aggressive flirter. 

Lily almost rolled her eyes, and then her lips quirked at Clay.

"Vala, Colonel Franklin Clay. Clay, this is Vala Mal Doran," she introduced. Then, in an undertone to Vala, "Behave, we just got him." 

Clay was ready to raise an eyebrow at that, because he was right _there_ , thank you very much, and didn't need, what, protection? Then Vala smiled, wide and dazzling and just a little bit predatory, and got up to join Clay on his side of the booth.

"Can I join you folks?" 

"Col—Cameron," Lily corrected herself when the man – late thirties, sandy blond hair, mild Kansas drawl, something of a fighter pilot's cockiness – raised his brows at her. "Of course. What are you drinking?"

The man looked a little surprised, but settled in and let her get him a beer. 

"Cam, this is Colonel Franklin Clay," Vala introduced him, and Clay felt unsettlingly like he was a mouse being shown off by a smug cat. It was at least halfway between terrifying and arousing. "Clay, Colonel Cameron Mitchell."

"Cam," Mitchell corrected her, and reached out to shake Clay's hand.

Lily returned with beer for Mitchell, another scotch for Clay, and something pink and sticky with an umbrella for Vala, who grinned toothily.

"Thank you. You didn't have to," Mitchell said.

"You took me _flying_ ," she said. "That merits a drink, or three."

"One, _I_ got to go flying, which I don't do often anymore," Mitchell said, amused. "And two, Sam already owes me for it."

"Well, that just makes it a really great deal for you, doesn't it?"

Mitchell laughed.

"What kind of flying?" Clay asked, distracting himself – and hopefully Vala – from the way she was pressing in to him, her thigh warmly against his.

"X-302," Mitchell supplied. "They're a mix between foreign-" handwave to indicate he really meant 'alien', "-and domestic flight tech. Spaceworthy, short range. Lots of fun."

"And Lee here discovered she's an adrenalin addict just like the rest of us," Vala said, pressing her knee against Clay's.

"Pretty sure that, given that she voluntarily and repeatedly jumps through wormholes into emergency situations, that wasn't entirely news to her," Mitchell said, amused. 

"I'm not sure if I'm allowed to enjoy that," Lily mused, head tilted. "But I do enjoy climbing the cakewalk – that's a really high airbridge in the city -" she gave as an aside to Clay, "Which is how I gained the favour from Colonel Carter in the first place. I spent a few free mornings helping her tackle it."

"So did I catch rightly that you," Mitchell gestured at Lily with his beer, "recruited this entire team? Because you don't seem like the recruiting type to me."

"There's a decent 'they followed me home, so I'm keeping them' joke in there somewhere, but I'm saving it for the right moment," she said, deadpan. 

 

The conversation drifted pleasantly, and Clay learned that Vala was 'not from around here' which, it took far too long to sink in, meant she _wasn't from Earth_. By then he was a little off his game from the scotch – not drunk, they all knew better than to get drunk, but a little fuzzy around the edges.

Vala continued to be agressively flirtatious, and seemed to enjoy his response; apparently they agreed that flirting was its own joy and didn't necessarily need to go anywhere. When she pushed things a little further at one point and slithered onto his lap, Mitchell said "Vala.." in a completely level tone, and she pouted prettily and slid back down to the bench.

"You never let me have any fun. Lee doesn't need to keep all these tasty guys to herself."

Lily snorted orange juice, clapped a hand over her nose and mouth, and made an undignified exit to the washrooms. Mitchell watched her go with amused sympathy in his eyes. Apparently he was used to dealing with Vala. Possibly he timed his drinking with hers. Clay decided that was probably a good policy. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vala showed up! I kind of struggle to leave her who she is without making her ridiculous. She's hard to write, but she wanted to be there and break Clay's brain. She's not allowed to talk to Jensen though.
> 
> I had a really shitty day and I'm posting this to cheer myself up. So here's the not entirely shameless feedback whoring portion of the update: please make my day and tell me what you thought? *pleading eyes*


	7. Chapter 7

It wasn't all that late when they decided to head back to the mountain; training would begin early the next day. The guys were all a little buzzed, talking and occasionally still slapping each other's hands good-naturedly.

Clay had had his doubts about going to a bar after the revelations of the day, but maybe it had been good after all. Some time to unwind and put into perspective the new things to incorporate into their worldview. A moment to experience that some things were still the same, like having a drink with teammates.

Lily offered to take Vala back to the Mountain with them – she apparently lived there – so Mitchell could head straight home. Vala had seemed pretty tipsy while they were still in the booth. She'd had six of the terrible pink concoctions, and she'd been leaning into him and underlining her speaking with sloppy gestures. When they got up to leave though, there wasn't a trace of inebriation and she once again moved with the sure, sensuous motions that made his mouth go dry.

"You're not really drunk, are you?" he asked, amused, as they walked out of the bar. She pressed close to his side while they walked. "I used to be a space pirate," she whispered in his ear. "Holding your drink is an important space pirate skill."

He couldn't tell if she was joking.

Vala made to pile into the back row of seats after Clay and Jensen, but Colbert blocked her, angling his tall body in front of her.

"Oh, _hello_ ," she purred, recovering from bouncing into his chest and going into what might actually be auto-flirt mode.

"You ride shotgun," Colbert said firmly.

"But I wouldn't take up space in the back at all," she purred. "I can just sit on the laps of Clay and the pretty blonde boy."

"Shotgun."

"Come on Vala, I need somebody to give me Mountain gossip," Lily said, and Vala pouted, then got into the front passenger seat as if that had been her plan all along.

"Why doesn't he like me?" she whispered to Lily in what she apparently thought was a confidential tone. Clay had already figured out that she specialised in industrial grade bullshit, so much distracting flash that it was hard to even see the shape of the things that actually mattered. This though.. Clay thought she might be genuinely unsure about it.

Maybe Lily heard it too, because she sounded almost gentle.

"You got his friend into trouble last year."

"You military types are so uptight," Vala said, with a comical little huff.

"We military types do not like being shouted at by Generals," Lily agreed. "it's a funny quirk we share."

When they were all in, Pooch, who was at the sliding door, pulled it shut, and Lily started the van.

 

"How often do you drive a car, exactly?" Pooch asked as she cautiously pulled out of the parking lot.

"Not very often," she admitted brightly. "Backseat drivers should feel free to exit the vehicle. Through the window."

Pooch was the world's worst passenger, and had been left on the side of the road more than once after commenting on Jolene's driving.

Jensen chose that moment to distract him with a discussion about rock-paper-lizard-spock, which was a game they'd apparently begun back in bar.

Lily didn't drive fast, but she was careful and safe on the road, so they all wisely refrained from commenting. Apart from when it started to rain a little.

Colbert, in the seat behind her, was laughing softly, his edges a little softened by alcohol. He leaned forward to look over her shoulder, in her space in a way that reminded Clay strangely of Jensen with his sister.

"You're trying to turn the wipers on with your mind, aren't you?"

"Um..."

Clay couldn't see her face in the mirror, but her shrug said 'I might be.'

Roque, behind Vala, snorted, and Lily shot a look at him over her shoulder.

"Right hand, yeah there, move that up," Roque said with a grin in his voice.

She did as he said.

"Just you wait until you've been in the city for a while," she said, pulling onto the empty highway and keeping precisely to the speed limit. Clay saw Pooch twitch, but restrain himself from commenting. "First time you're back here and thinking 'open' at a locked door, I'll be there in spirit, laughing," Lily promised.

Which Roque took as a cue to start shit about Aikido, calling it performance dance art.

To the Losers, who spoke fairly fluent Roque, this demonstrated a level of familiarity with her that there definitely hadn't been so far, especially after the incident that morning. If Roque pushed you like this, he was looking for you to push back, give him something to work with. It was perhaps the first step to him working out if he could consider you a friend and an equal. It was always a toss-up how other people took it though. Aisha hadn't gotten it at all, had gotten pissed off with him.

"Not everything has to be purely functional," she shrugged, unruffled. "To me it's as much art as it is martial. My former training partner on Atlantis, he was also one of my dance partners," she said, a smile in her voice. "He and I used to train Aikido to Tango music." She grinned at the memory. "AikiTango."

Clay took a moment to picture that. The passion of tango, the grace and control and inheld power of high level Aikido. It sounded kind of... hot.

"Violent dancing," Roque nodded approvingly, apparently forgetting he'd meant to get a rise out of her. "Sounds fun."

"It is."

"I need a demonstration," Vala declared. "Possibly video."

"Well, Staff Sergeant Wenckworth is Second Lieutenant Wenckworth now, and I'm pretty sure the IOA will want to offer him a commission when he's through with the Basic School."

"I think Captain Bahir would go on strike if they didn't ask him back to Atlantis," Colbert grinned. "Bahir runs the primary trade team," he explained to the Losers. "Wenckworth used to be his NCO. Point is, if Bahir strikes, we'd be reduced to a Toba root and Juju fruit diet pretty damn fast."

"Urgh, don't remind me. We did that for like, a month, in my first year there," Lily grimaced. "Not a happy time in terms of our collective gastro-intestinal wellbeing."

"But you think he'll come back, so you can show the sexy fight-dance thing?" Vala prompted, bringing them back to more pleasant mental images.

"From what he's said, normal Marine things are kind of boring now, and nobody gets his jokes," she shrugged. "So if not Atlantis, then the SGC. Once you're a five-year Gate team veteran, they're not letting you go if they can help it."

"You talk to him?" Colbert asked. Clay was a little surprised as well. Normally an officer probably wouldn't keep in touch with an NCO once they'd left their unit. From the sounds of it she'd mostly known the guy socially though, and he was already learning the rules and conventions on Atlantis were different.

"Mostly he sends me video clips to make sure I'm appropriately jealous of the cool high-level training and seminars he can go to while my skill languishes," she chuckled.

 

Jensen told truly awful knock-knock jokes to the airmen at the security point, then declared them to have no sense of humour. Cougar herded him into the lift before they could get more than mildly frowney about it. It was nearing midnight; close to the end of shift.

They got to the floor that held the Atlantis training accommodation, and the Losers had already trooped out the lift when Clay realised Vala, Lily and Colbert were going further down, which made for a sooner than expected goodbye.

"Thank you for taking us along tonight," he said quickly, slapping a hand over the sensor to keep the lift door open.

"You're welcome," Lily said. "We'll see you when you get to the city."

"Thanks for recruiting us!" Jensen called from the back of the group.

Colbert broke into a grin.  
"I think you recruited yourself there, buddy."

As the doors slid shut Lily said "Good luck with your training" and Vala blew him a kiss, and then they were gone.

"Well. Not a bad night," Pooch declared as they headed toward their quarters.

"Atlantis sounds like a strange place," Cougar said.

"Yeah, Colbert had all these skills he hoped we would bring. Like... pastry baking. And dinghy sailing. They want competition crew. And apparently their Jazz band is looking for a sax player...?" Pooch said. It had been kind of weird, but maybe the whole 'We'd get credit for recruiting people with the desired off-duty skills' thing had been a joke.

 

The next morning started bright and early with PT. Espera took them above ground to run a steep mountain trail. The cracks about Chair Force level workouts dried up pretty fast when they never could catch up with the gate team – including a civilian scientist – that was a couple of minutes ahead of them.

(The Losers could estimate the relative positions of the two groups because snatches of singing kept drifting down to them from the next bend in the trail. The Gate team appeared to be improvising lyrics to the tune of _Mr Boombastic_ )

At the apex of the trail was an observation shack with they were rewarded with a pretty cool view, as well as bottles of water and Gatorade from a fridge in the shack.

"So what can we expect from the next month?" Clay asked.

"There's a whole list of courses you need to pass, though given your training I think it will be less new material and more familiar material in a new context," Espera said. "There's a lot of virtual reality training, that's cool. And I have a request from Captain Morton to let him take you through a few training scenarios."

"Who is Morton?"

"He's the SGC's Combat Rescue Officer – Brittner's counterpart. I think she asked him to asses you."

"That's not standard?" Roque asked as they got to their feet to start the descent.

"No, but then, you guys aren't standard," Espera said. "It's just info gathering so they can find the best way to use you guys."

 

After PT they were summoned to an honest to got classroom and were presented with a schedule that was heavy on things like 'First Contact; Negotiating Alien Cultures', 'Wraith 101' 'Hostage Training and Negotiating' and 'Operating in hostile environments'.

"Isn't that pretty much what we _do_?" Pooch asked.

"This refers more to how to recognise if the plant life is trying to kill you," Espera said. "It's kind of... defensive driving for your health and safety."

 

They were half an hour into a video about the key points in the Go'auld conflict when Warszawski picked them up to take them down to see the Gate.

"The summit thing is over and the Atlantis people are leaving now, so I could finally get authorisation to bring you down there," he said, leading them to the lift.

They went to a cargo bay that held one of the little Ancient spaceships – Puddlejumpers, _really?_ who had thought of that name? - and a scanner station that looked like you'd find at an airport. There were three Marine sergeants with large stacks of gear, which was getting scanned.

In the back of the spaceship Brittner and Colbert were tensioning a cargo net which was holding a ceiling-high stack of crates in place.

The others were talking, but Roque felt himself walking toward the spacecraft, strangely drawn to it.

"Oh. Hi Roque," Brittner said, and he realised he was already halfway up the ramp. "Talking to you, is she?"

"Is that..." he struggled to concentrate. There was a loud – big? Something coming at him, sounds and images and symbols and sensations streaming past him too fast and unfamiliar to interpret, always just out of reach. Not for lack of trying. He strained to understand. "Is that what it is?"

He had walked through to the cockpit without consciously making that decision, and she'd followed him.

"It's hard to process at first. You learn to make sense of it."

The HUD came up and Roque startled at the echo in his head, the incomprehensible data moving and shifting.

"That was me. One moment," Brittner said, and he could _feel_ how she flicked through the different scanner views, how the stream of data was directed past him at her and he was just observing it. "Okay, I'm going to try to get the jumper to ignore me. Things might be clearer if it's just you interfacing with her."

Something changed again, the datastream redirected itself directly at him, and he distantly felt his knees buckle as it roared over him like a wave. Brittner deftly steered him to sit down in one of the seats and stayed in front of him, her boots planted in front of his so he couldn't slip and slump down.

Everything was even louder now, taking over his perceptions until Brittner's face and voice – she was talking to somebody... Clay? - were distant seconds. It felt different now that she had stepped out of the interface, as if she'd been sitting next to him and had handed him the reins. He reached out to an intriguing swirl of data and it unfurled, revealing infinite streams of symbols he didn't understand. He withdrew and it furled up again.

"...just back off gently, like that, that's good," he heard Brittner say, and he focused on her face until the flood of data allowed itself to be pushed into the background.

He just sat and blinked for a few long breaths.

"Wow."

She grinned, brief and wide, and stepped back to give him space.

"Really something, huh?"

"Roque?" Clay asked, sounding concerned and not concealing it.

"I'm fine. It's just-- overwhelming," he said. Then, slowly, "It.. she.. is alive?"

"There are lengthy debates about that. Some would say that it's programmed to interface with those who have the right genetic code. I like to think there is a degree of consciousness there."

"Huh."

 

A few minutes later the jumper was fully loaded up, and handshakes were exchanged. Espera grinned and just outright hugged Colbert, who looked uncomfortable for a second and then gave in and returned the embrace.

Warszawski drew Brittner away for what looked like an intense conversation in low voices, his posture tense. When the others had all finished their goodbyes they seemed to come to some kind of conclusion, or at least Warszawski's shoulders relaxed, and they embraced briefly.

"Gentlemen," Brittner said from the ramp, hand already on the switch to close it. "Stay out of trouble. Kimsuhr," she nodded at Warszawski, who smiled. The ramp started to close, and Warszawski shook himself and lead them out of the area.

  
They went to a conference room that looked into a large space, and that was their first real look at the Stargate. It was huge – they'd known that, but somehow the scale was still a surprise, the way it resided over the room, silent and full of infinite possibilities.

Roque felt drawn to it in a similar way as he'd felt drawn to the jumper, though this wasn't the perception hi-jack the jumper had been. Maybe it was just interest, because Jensen seemed to be having the same response, the two of them standing with their noses almost up against the window, hands twitching.

The Jumper came inching ponderously through a side door, making a slow, controlled five-point turn to get lined up properly for the ramp. Through the window they could see Colbert and Brittner in the pilot seats, talking and looking relaxed as they eased the little spaceship into place.

 _Dialling Midway Station_ , a voice announced over the PA system.

The ring on the Stargate started to turn, and they'd seen this process on video several times now, but the loud mechanical clunks as the chevrons engaged still made all of them twitch forward, like there was a charge building and they couldn't help being conductors.

"This one seems so clunky and old-fashioned when you've gotten used to the ones in Pegasus," Espera said to Warszawski, but nobody paid them any mind.

The Losers were lined up by the big conference window, drawn into the spell of the giant device which was making a wormhole to another galaxy. When the last symbol had locked and a great column of silvery matter roared into the gate room, the five of them rocked back onto their heels in unison. There was a chuckle from Espera, and then as one man they leant forward again, pressed up against the glass to see as much as they could.

_Atlantis Jumper Four, you are cleared for Midway Station_

A few moments later the little spacecraft reached the top of the ramp, and unceremoniously disappeared into the silvery surface. The wormhole rippled for a few seconds, and then winked out of existence like a soap bubble popping.

"That is SO wrong," Clay said.

At the same moment Jensen sighed, "That is SO awesome."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been a while! There's just an epilogue to go now. Hope you enjoyed - feedback, as always, very much appreciated.


	8. Epilogue

"Fine fuckin' mess you got us into, Clay," Roque sighed. He turned away from the heavy, ancient wooden door and sat down on the bale of straw.

Clay tilted his head to look at Roque over the edge of his totally unnecessary sunglasses, and raised his eyebrows.

"Hey, I _told_ you we should leave him in the jumper," Roque said, absently touching his empty knife sheaths. They'd left the weapons in the jumper, because Atlantis had a good relationship with this planet and no weapons had been allowed inside for the ceremony. "Jensen can't be quiet for 30 seconds and you bring him into a silence ritual?"

Clay tilted his head in a way that might indicate that he was conceding the point to Roque, or he might have just been getting more comfortable. He was sitting against the other straw bale, long legs stretched out in front of him

A fine fucking mess.

The Losers had been functioning as Atlantis Recon team 11 for five months now. Until recently they'd been doubled up with other teams, learning to navigate their way around alien cultures, Ancient dangers and all the other things that came with stepping through the Stargate. Four months in they'd begun to get class 3 missions, which were largely milk runs. When that had gone off with little more than the occasional hitch, they'd graduated to class 2 missions. Class 1 was exploration and possible first contact – class 2 was follow-up on first contact, and distant acquaintances.

Roque knew there was an unofficial ranking of each gate team on a scale of soft skills (negotiation, de-escalation, cultural sensitivity) versus hard skills (military strength) and that Command assigned missions accordingly.

The Losers still classed as a hard team, and the plan to train them into being a second SRE team had been dropped when it had become clear none of them had particular talent for the requisite soft skills. Roque had assumed that was par for the course for purely military teams, but apparently AR-7 - all Recon Marines - had cultivated soft skills and turned itself into one of the most versatile teams on the rota.

The Losers' niche looked like it was going to be contact with the more martial cultures Atlantis kept in contact with, and backing up AR-4 on hostile rescue ops, where their ability to operate independently and creatively was most valued. Roque had worried that 'lack of soft skills' would mean 'no interesting missions,' so he was relieved they were getting put to their best use.

Only, you know, it would have been nice if their first Class 2 mission would not have ended in a cell.

At least they weren't in the same cave-cell as Jensen and Pooch. Roque could hear them through two of the heavy wooden doors. They'd started out agitated, Pooch pissed off with Jensen for getting them into the shit. Worried. Now they'd returned to mostly normal tones, Jensen's familiar rambling rhythm with occasional interjections from Pooch.

Roque wasn't worried about them. He was worried about Cougar, who was – as far as they knew – still in the ceremony. None of the Losers had ever been keen to leave one of their own out of contact during a mission. Knowing Cougar would be on his own if anything went bad – worse than it already had – set Roque's teeth on edge.

His watch buzzed slightly, indicating their check-in with Atlantis was now an hour past. The gate room officer would have tried to raise them twice after their missed check-in, and then scrambled a team to check things out. That's what Roque had been telling himself for the last half hour or so. There'd be a team of Atlanteans on this planet, working to get them out.

Atlantis would come for them, because Atlantis always came for its people. They might have to sacrifice profitable trade to get the Losers back, though, because the expedition never made enemies where it didn't have to. The city was currently experiencing a beer shortage after it had traded away most of its sorghum – the principal brewing grain in Pegasus – for Alpha Company's third platoon. The Marines had destroyed most of the harvest of the people on PX9-717 in an overly enthusiastic training exercise, and nobody in the city had finished giving them shit for being the cause of the beer shortage.

With the amount of planets Atlantis had contact with it was always harvest time somewhere, but brewing was recreational, not essential, so sorghum trade wasn't considered a priority.

No, Atlantis would come, negotiate the Losers to freedom, and by tomorrow this would be nothing more than an awkward mission report and a reminder that a run of successful missions didn't mean you couldn't step miles deep into the shit on the next planet.

 

Three quarters of an hour later they heard people enter the cave system. The locals wore soft-soled shoes, so he couldn't be sure if any of them had come, but he counted four pairs of combat boots. The murmur of conversation he couldn't quite make out sounded amiable. Whatever negotiations had happened seemed to have been settled. He hoped the price hadn't been too steep.

Clay and Roque got to their feet when Lee Brittner became visible through the bars of their cell door. She studied them for a few seconds, looking for signs of injury, Roque thought.

"Hi Lee. So how deep in the shit are we?" Clay asked.

"Hi guys," she said, and made a considering sound and a little handwaggle. Then: "You okay? Anybody hurt?"

"We're fine," Clay said quickly. "Have you seen Coug--Alvarez?"

"Si, I am here," they heard from behind Lee. He helped her lift the massive bar from the brackets of the door, and then Clay and Roque could finally walk out.

A few doors down Staff Sergeant Colbert and Lieutenant Wenckworth released Jensen and Pooch. All the newcomers looked dusty and a little weary. Roque wondered if they'd been recalled from a mission or had just returned from one when the Losers had needed a rescue.

After establishing nobody was in need of immediate medical care, Brittner let them know they'd all need to be silent until they were in the jumper, and they trooped out of the cave system.

"And I suggest you look chastised," she added before they stepped into the daylight. Colbert coughed to hide a chuckle, and she shot him a look that was more amusement than reproach.

 

Outside they picked up Captain Avery and AR4's new scientist, Dr Valiente, who had been in low-voiced conversation with one of the Elders.

 

Once they'd filed into the jumper, which was very full with 10 people, the silence broke. Jensen loudly declared it had not been him who had gotten them into trouble, Pooch jumped in, and Jensen explained to Captain Avery and Dr Valiente – a short, sturdy woman in her late thirties with a seemingly unending capacity to listen to people talk – that it had been the others who'd broken the silence.

Which was technically correct – the best kind of correct according to Jensen – because Jensen had opened his mouth to speak and Clay, Roque and Pooch had hushed him in unison. Then Jensen had hissed an indignant "What?!" and, well.

As Cougar smoothly lifted the jumper into the air, Clay picked a seat on the bench opposite Lee.

"I hope the price wasn't too high."

"Oh, we brought Lieutenant Wenckworth and his stellar negotiation skills," she said breezily, and Wenckworth, hearing his name, threw them a grin and a salute. Roque had caught the rumour that the Gunnery Sergeant-turned-Lieutenant was up for the Combat Rescue Officer course, so he could head up the 2nd SRE team Atlantis needed. That explained why he was running with AR4.

"Thanks to him, I paid for your freedom in one fell, slightly bloody yank."

She fished a small biohazard bag out of her cargo pocket and Clay grimaced when he saw it contained dental forcepts and a bloody, blackened stump of a tooth.

"Bloody hell, Lee, stop showing that to people," Captain Avery called from the cockpit.

"Can't I be pleased I did a Dental Works refresher just last month?" she called back, amusement lacing her voice. "That was a highly skilled twist and yank, I'll have you know."

"And I'm sure Dr Seigman will be very impressed, but you could just _tell_ people."

She huffed a chuckle and put the bag away, slumping against the backrest.

"So what do we say, is being traded against tooth-pulling skills better or worse than being traded for a couple of crates of Toba root?" Colbert asked, leaning into the door opening of the cargo space with a grin.

"Better, I reckon. I mean, dentistry is a specialised skill," Lee said, tilting her head back to rest against the bulkhead. "Back in the first year they'd set up on markets and earn a week's worth of supplies for the city in a day."

"Toba root?" Roque asked, watching the interplay with amusement.

"Well you see," Colbert started, "about two years ago AR4 went to this same planet..."

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yay, it's done! Thank you everybody who reviewed!
> 
> [I'm on tumblr and sometimes I talk about Rock Happy there (there's a rock happy tag! And you can always send me asks about it there too)](http://primarybufferpanel.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Also, if you only have this story subscribed, there is more neat stuff in the Rock Happy series that you may not have seen yet, so [check it out :-)](http://archiveofourown.org/series/16566)

**Author's Note:**

> If you're from The Losers fandom and you want to know what the hell this was all about, and you have a day or so... click on the series link and check out Rock Happy.
> 
> This will probably-maybe be the last part of the Rock Happy series. It's still in my head though, and if you're into tumblr I'd be thrilled if you came over to [my tumblr](http://primarybufferpanel.tumblr.com/) and talked to me - about anything, but especially about Rock Happy! Possible THE most awesome thing about writing such a big universe has been sharing that world and talking to readers. There is also a Rock Happy tag there where I've put some thoughts and headcanons etc, so that might be fun :-)


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